PSYCHOLOGY NEWS Surge in book sales! CYBERSTALKING BY PSYCHOLOGISTS..... fireflySun.com contributor denies claim by PhD candidate that site contributor was reprimanded for filing false review to Amazon. In a classy move designed to maintain quality standards, news reader Talk about Health.com seizes on defamatory posts, leaving sci.psychology.psychotherapy out of its group list News reader PA Health Systems, after suspending its practice of archiving posts to sci.psychology.psychotherapy for over a month, deleted defamatory posts from its archive.Posts to other support groups remain intact and currentWyatt Ehrenfels urged PA Health System administrators to stop archiving posts to this group, citing its use as a defamation delivery system References to PA Health Systems in the text of the cyberstalking report will be expunged.

Look Who's Stalking Now:

Psychologists Participate in Cyberstalking Ring to Manage Flow of Information Favorable to Opinions in Unmoderated Sci.Psychology.Psychotherapy "News Group"

Question: "What would compel a former member of the Iowa Board of Psychology Examiners, a bestselling author, and a PhD candidate depicting herself as the darling of her department to participate in cyberstalking?"

Answer ... "Wyatt Ehrenfels."

It was supposed to have been a light dinner conversation. I inadvertently inhaled what must have been a gram of ground peppercorn off my steak, but all that whooping and wheezing could have easily been misattributed to the lovably madcap death threat an old college buddy claimed to have uncovered in a Google search on my nom de plume. Against the guffawing and chortling of some of my more hardened dinner guests, those for whom the very first thought was my welfare reacted with a sullen probing kicked off by the question: "What's this guy's problem?". As I laid out the tragi-comic events for them, their interest deepened. They marveled at the nearly year-long stream of unprovoked and very public threats and accusations, written as if addressing me privately. "The funny thing about it," remarked an old friend, "is that you never respond to him." But my friend's observation only raised more questions, such as "Who is this idiot?" and "Why is he doing this?"; but curiosity had not reached its fevered pitch until I escorted my audience away from overtures about this fellow's mental health toward what I deemed a question of the sixty-four-thousand-dollar variety. A question with more sociological import. I could almost see the glimmer gathering within the wife of a co-worker, prying her eyes and parting her lips as if dilating a mental cervix. Pushing itself out into the open. "And why are these other people helping him?". Mesmerized, quite possibly captivated by the improbability and absurdity of it all, her husband reframed ... "Okay, so who are they and why are they doing this?" ...
... I'm glad he asked.

Updated: August 18, 2004

They include clinical psychologists. And so when one of my former professors asked why a former representative of the Iowa Psychology Association, a bestselling author, and a beloved PhD candidate with a promising future would assume prominent roles in a cyberstalking ring, I felt it was my duty as a social psychologist to explain why "Wyatt Ehrenfels" is at best just the short answer.

As a play on the self-moniker ("Internet Underground") of the world's largest decentralized user network, some people are calling Usenet a "sewer," but Wyatt Ehrenfels contends that where abuse is chronically active, one news group stands alone. Imagine my surprise (har har) upon discovering that this forum, which appeals to juveniles of all ages, was a psychology news group.

I do not usually devote attention to illicit activities among psychologists (e.g. the occasional report citing sex with a client), because I generally believe there are rotten apples in every barrel. Moreover, drawing attention to the rotten apples may bolster support for this ever-widening nucleus of arbitrary, superfluous ... fiercely professional policies and procedures ... standards intended to limit the number of rotten apples in Psychology's barrel, but at an insufferable price. As blunt instruments, the standards act as a finely meshed soup strainer, limiting all unconventional tendencies, including original thinking and anything that reeks of single-source contemplation and reflection. Consequently, the 'best and brightest' are weeded out along with the 'bad.' I'm willing to wager as author of this report that you (the reader) need not have had to lose a beloved pet to a 'bug bomb' to appreciate such a tragedy. In a nutshell, we sacrifice much to sanitize our field. So how can we defend these sacrifices in the face of our share of rotten apples?

The Wonderful World of Group Cyberstalking

They refer to themselves as the CABAL. In the middle of some menacing melee in which Usenet stalwarts in sci.psychology.psychotherapy come together to disrupt, defame, and frighten an individual, you will often read the phrase "Long live the CABAL." Webster's Unabridged Revised Dictionary (1996, 1998) defines a CABAL as number of persons united in some close design, usually to promote their private views and interests in church or state by intrigue; a secret association composed of a few designing persons; a junto. The term was selected to conjure in its victims images not unlike those of the Venetian-masked satyrs in the film Eyes Wide Shut. With forged headers and remailers the individual stalkers achieve a technological anonymity to erase all traces of personal contributions to this socially facilitated form of group stalking. While science fiction director Stanley Kubrick invited you to suspend disbelief in the premise that prominent members of society can anonymously participate in a secret sexual society, I, social psychologist Wyatt Ehrenfels will open your eyes to a Usenet cyberstalking ring consisting of a small nucleus of academics and professionals aided by a much larger group of non-degree holding supplicants and belligerents with criminal and psychiatric histories ... (see Meet the Stalkers for a character analysis of each of the major contributors to the stalking ring).

In a cyber-ghetto ... far ... far away ... if we look beneath the cacophonous and cruelly untranscendent dronings ... the clutter of innocuous flames ... all the witless zinging ... we can discern a coordinated system of strategies and tactics designed to manage public opinion and disrupt a target's life through libel, distraction, and intimidation. But in the event time does not permit you to reach that point in this report, I would like you to come away with a 'skeleton list' of the most egregious tactics:

Entering the Hive

The [INSERT YOUR NAME HERE] FAQ. This call-to-arms against a target (just imagine for a moment that it is you) masquerades as a 'frequently asked questions' document. Your residential (and possibly work) address, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses (and in some cases supported with a link to a satellite photo) are the opening (and only accurate) lines of a report in an otherwise falsifying and inflammatory document designed to solicit aggression and mobilize hostilities against you. This practice is known as larting. (Short for 'loser attitude readjustment tools').

Recruiting Allies, Accomplices from Other News Groups. Every news group has regulars with intolerance to the personal views or ventings of others. I suspect it's something on the order of a psychological disorder really -- not unlike the Road Rage some psychologists want added to the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. You tack a bulletin-board style message to the forum and lo and behold it triggers in some forum lurker a phobia-like sensitivity that produces an instantaneous, all-or-none reflex-like compulsion to retaliate. Just what are they retaliating against? Well, the terms they use to describe your offensive characteristics range from "arrogance" to "abuse" to "kookery" and may be garnished by accusations of "fraudulence" and "deception." In a nutshell, what you see as a routine exercise in sharing ideas, they impugn as an exercise in self-promotion and breach of netiquette. And they view it as their office to harass you until you stop producing new traces of yourself on the Web, and they work to discredit what part of you remains -- what you've left behind. Let's call this disorder Ego Inflation Disorder, or EID. Consult this link for symptoms of this disorder.

There was once a time when an individual only had to worry about the response of 2-4 lurkers in the news group to which he or she submitted a message. But in 1993 a group of EID carriers collaborated to charter a news group devoted purely to the harassment of defamation of victims Usenet-wide. The news group is known as alt.usenet.kooks, and over the decade it developed into a sensitive and responsive nerve center, replacing the man-to-man coverage of kooks with a zone defense that threatened prospective users of the news groups with attacks from complete strangers.

Naturally, my instinctive reaction to finding this message is one of "okay, so who are you? And how do you know me?" Here I find that I've been named in a list of kooks by a woman (AKA Lola Stonewall Riot) with whom I never corresponded and of whom I have never heard. Judging from the clues she left me, I dropped some of my unconventional wisdom about dreams & dreaming (being a dream researcher and all) in one of several Yahoo Pagan Discussion forums for which she serves as moderator, most likely TPW_Pagan_Dreams. (Six messages between December 21, 2002 and March 28, 2004 to be precise). So what is more inappropriate? That I posted a half dozen messages to a Yahoo group? Or that this evangelical pagan moderates 30 of them? Given this dishonorable mention in Usenet, one could be forgiven for thinking I got caught in a hatemongerer's dragnet. It is worth noting that the list in which she dropped my name includes other individuals of whom I have never heard and that she crossposted this message to a number of Physics forums in which I never participated. Well, if she had any kind of problem with me -- be it with my thoughts on dreams & dreaming or something else -- this is the first I'm hearing of it. Someone who's posted 80 messages that begin "Eris Kallisti Discordia was laughing at the antics of ..." would be advised not to be too liberal with the kook label. You see, according to sources on Greek Mythology, Eris Kallisti Discordia is described as the Goddess of Chaos and according to pagan cults, Goddess of Chaos and Mother of us All." Yeah ... I'm a kook.

"I think the worst threat we faced as individuals had been the kook hunter who decided to research our families and punish those we love," commented one victim. "But with the advent of alt.usenet.kooks, not only are the victims strangers once-removed from the user, but the assailants themselves may be strangers with whom the user never had any contact. If your local adversary had been recruited into alt.usenet.kooks, this person may have circulated your name in this forum, exposing you to a collection of harassment hobbyists and other opportunistic predators, flame warriors, and game enthusiasts. If you remember the Zimbardo prisoner experiments of the late 1960s, one of the key ingredients for violence is the simple demarcation between individuals nominally designated as criminals and nominally designated as guards. Members of alt.usenet.kooks capitalizes on this same tactic by collecting individuals to wear the labels 'kook' and 'kook hunter.' A full-blown outbreak of EID is quite a spectacle, with associates once-removed from the kook-hunter attacking the friends, family, and resources once removed from the kook. In a nutshell, strangers on strangers").

EID is an infectious disorder, which is to say it is transmitted socially. Like any infection, EID spreads best under certain conditions. EID carriers can scan the news groups easily for other EID carriers, and social and technological sources of anonymity make networks of EID carriers attractive to individuals vulnerable to the disorder.

Ironically (and this paradox is key to winning public support for the disorder), there's a point at which the kookologists themselves become so shrill and so insidiously ubiquitous, as to become kooks themselves. They not only meet the same standards of irrationality and officiousness they malign in their victims, but their spam advertising, zealous recruiting, and ideology conjure images of cults. The only difference between the people they capture as kooks for their card decks and chess sets, and the kookologists themselves, is that the alleged kooks act independently as individuals. In effect, we have isolated the quality the kookologists really despise in those they label kooks -- independence. In the view of kookologists, to submit one's idiosyncratic reflections or complaints to the web ... without permission, without backing, and without the expectation of public support ... is right up there with advertising your Yard Sale without a permit. Oh the humanity! If you ask me, kookologists are everything the kook is, without the positive qualities that make kooks autonomous agents.

Search Engine Vandalism, Hijacking of Web Resources. Unmoderated Usenet news groups are efficient vehicles for the dissemination of EID content. Search makes it so easy to discover and leap between all these groups and cross-post recruitment propaganda, defamatory FAQs, and links to web-based dossiers, all of which buoys the rank of this material in the results of a Web Search on the victim's name. How? Imagine that someone creates a web site, or page on a web site, that libels you. "The [INSERT YOUR NAME HERE] FAQ," for example. Under the worst possible scenario, the kook hunter registers a domain in your name so that the "The [INSERT YOUR NAME HERE] FAQ" lives on a domain called [INSERT YOUR NAME].com. Other kook hunters, who have learned about you through alt.usenet.kooks, then decide to house this same FAQ on a page of their own anti-kook web sites. All these clones, which by the way load key word meta tags with variations of your name and quite possibly the names of family members and professional affiliations, are cross-linked. More often than not, this network of inter-linked and search-optimized web sites containing the FAQ dominates the first page of search results on your name, including the # 1 spot.

But just as problematic as the ranking of these dossiers is the sheer number of them. When messages containing links to all these clones are cross-posted to various news groups, they are multiplied in the search engine results by the number of web-based news readers that reproduce these message for the Web. News readers, specialized web sites that provide Web access to news groups, assign a unique URL to each Usenet news group message, so the search engines treat each of the duplicate messages as independent web sites requiring indexing. This gives us the following formula to calculate the approximate number of libelous results you can expect to find in a Web Search of your name:

[number of libelous messages] x [number of news groups] x
[number of news readers accessing any one of these news groups]

If the self-styled kook hunter submits one libelous message to a single news group accessible via the web by 5 news readers, there will be [1] x [1] x [5] = 5 (five) instances of this message appearing in the results of a Google Web Search on your name. I have known victims for whom a search on their name will produce over 10,000 reproductions of libelous content originating in Usenet flame wars.

The links to the web sites that slander you may be hard-coded into the signature field of even those messages that are not about you, so that every message the kook hunter sends to Usenet (and this may be 6,000 over a 3-year period) spam advertises the anti-kook web sites and shores up their search engine ranking.

And it doesn't end there. At no expense, and with a minimum of effort, kook hunters might venture into the Web directly to create a defamatory entry about you in Wikipedia free encyclopedia, in the customer book review section of Amazon.com, or in any garden variety message board.

The False or Litigious Complaint. Most kook hunters are not delusional. They are simply propagandistic. In a complaint to your web host, ISP, or even to local law enforcement, a kook hunter will strategically telescope a violation of personal netiquette sensibilities into violations of ICANN rules, terms of service, or state or federal law. EID carriers in sci.psychology.psychotherapy have even attempted to leverage their academic and professional credentials in an effort to gain attention or favor in a dispute, in some cases using DSM diagnostic lingo to hang a pathology on their victims.

Defamation. EID carriers manufacture lies designed to discourage others from reading your messages or your web site. Subjective judgment? Educated speculation? Motivated misunderstanding? Political spin? I wouldn't be writing this report if I were dealing with any of the benign categories of falsehood listed above. While propaganda comes closest to describing the brazen measures used to manage a negative perception of Wyatt Ehrenfels et al., not even this phrase captures the total lack of decency and subtlety with which these spin doctors (AKA self-proclaimed "kook diagnosticians") weave out of whole cloth. The lies often masquerade as truth-squading (dredging), as the stalkers feign access to all sorts of 'fly-on-the-wall-knowledge' about you, from what went down in your classroom ten years ago to what is not happening in your bedroom and book store today [har har]. The truth is utterly beside the point. The perception of you these Internet fantasists seek to manage is nothing other than what they want others to believe about you.

Disruption. These stalkers follow you around the news groups. If you decide to leave sci.psychology.psychotherapy to post elsewhere, a search on your name will quickly identify your whereabouts, and they will visit their smear campaign in the new forum in an attempt to deny you an audience there. They will also use intimidation, adopting as enemies and subjecting to similar harassment, individuals who engage you in dialogue in spite of their warnings. And they use Google to keep tabs on your activity on the Web, attacking you in forums, searching on your IP address to thwart your use of pseudonyms to avoid their name search detection, and then seeking to explain your use of pseudonyms as criminal fraudulence.

Off-roading. The stalkers will even resort to some irregular but extraordinary measures to disrupt your real-life activities, including but not limited to ... never limited to ...

Illicitly procuring the credit card number of a target's supporter for the purpose of authenticating spurious [negative] customer reviews of your book in Amazon.com under your supporter's name. (See Cyberstalker Amazon for details)

Mailing CDs of defamatory information to prospective regional employers

Calling your residence, leaving you wondering how they obtained your phone number given you have been unpublished and given you have opted out of every sleazy people data search service (e.g. Intelius.com, 1-800-U.S. Search)

Hacking your e-mail accounts

Placing spyware on your PC

Sending menacing e-mails to your spouse and photos of your property to your postal mailing address

Impersonating you in posts to Internet forums to depict you as a spammer and make you vulnerable to claims of net abuse

After a number of strangers appeared at his door, one victim was surprised to learn his house was listed as being for sale. Not that this doesn't pose enough of an inconvenience, but I cannot help but wonder whether any of the stalkers used the 'for sale' status to 'get an inside look' at the victim, his home, and his family. A few months later the victim's wife received a phone call from a bank following up on her 'mortgage application.'

Why I Decided to Write This Report

In the month following the widespread circulation of this report, I fielded questions and concerns from many readers wondering why I would give people of the sort described in this report, paragons of petulance and immaturity, a home on my web site. Don't get me wrong. The spectacle of 50+-year-old men publicly making light of each other's *NUTSACKS* and claiming to have *SPANKED* one another does not get my motor running. Moreover, the fact we can count trained psychotherapists among them does not exactly inspire confidence in our service professions. What does interest me however as a social psychologist is the way professionals use interstate communications platforms to achieve personal and professional objectives. Many psychotherapists who will not explicitly seek therapy from their peers find therapeutic effects in forming alliances to defend the reputation of their field from alternative / critical points of view.

While I enjoy documenting the organizational culture, methodology, and impact of the sci.psychology.psychotherapy "news group," I am happy to avoid direct contact with its denizens. Resisting the childlike impulse to throw rocks at bee hives, I stopped posting to Usenet's news groups for two years. I first allowed them to drive me from sci.psychology.psychotherapy, an easy decision when you consider that a five-year census of the sci.psychology.psychotherapy archive revealed that greater than 95% of all messages in this “news group” have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with science or psychotherapy, and greater than 90% amount to personal attacks among forum participants, or flames (i.e. insulting criticisms or remarks meant to incite anger). Apparently the gang in sci.psychology.psychotherapy was less appeased by my gesture than Hitler by Czechoslovakia. Gang members googled my name daily, following me into other news groups suitable to my purpose and education (e.g. alt.psychology.jung, sci.psychology.personality), where the harassment persisted until I fled Usenet altogether. Playing into the hands of Usenet stalking gangs, law enforcement officials recommend victims of cyberstalking power down entirely and find some hobby that does not require the Internet. Swearing off Usenet was the next best thing. Only the next best thing wasn't quite good enough, as the gang used Google’s Web Search to pick up my trail in web-based listservs and message boards. And of course, there was also the matter of my Web site, prompting irritated psychologists, self-styled 'kook diagnosticians', and other hobby-hunting hatemongerers to handle me differently from other so-called 'net kooks.' They thought that if they kicked their cyberstalking into high gear, that I would be too distracted or too frightened to manage my activities as an author and as a pundit seeking to improve the science and education of the human condition.

I once assumed that by not responding to the stalkers, I was depriving them of what they needed to sustain their attack. I thought I was starving them of both target and ammunition. But having identified me as a 'dangerous kook' in that I have a web site and public life independent of Usenet, they pulled out all the stops to sustain the altercation in my absence. What they needed, they took from my web site, from year-old posts to Usenet, or from messages I posted elsewhere on the Internet. They would comb through my web site or through Google, kidnapping excerpts from my reports/messages, and respond to them in the Usenet news group to make it appear as if I was still hanging around. By creating a cardboard replica of me in Usenet and using the second person ("you") in their staged "replies", they were able to create the illusion of provocation.

Why? While there in no exchange of words in Usenet itself, a war is still being fought over the image of Wyatt Ehrenfels projected by web-based bodies of knowledge such as Google. And nothing propagates and elevates your name and your web pages more efficiently than dropping links to your site in the news groups. Having driven me from Usenet, the gang cut a crucial supply line that would have allowed me to influence how often and how well-ranked my web pages appeared in a Google or Yahoo search of anything I write about, including my own name. In the second and continual phase of battle, the gang disseminates messages throughout Usenet that depict me in a false or unflattering light. A single 2-message thread cross-posted to a dozen news groups will eventually, in the absence of any response from me, result in 24 defamatory messages in the results of a search of “Wyatt Ehrenfels” in Google Web. Owing to the fact the news groups receive so much traffic … to the glut of ISPs and news readers that link directly to Usenet … and owing to the fact Google proudly interfaces with Usenet under its own branding (i.e. “Google Groups”), these 24 messages are almost guaranteed to rank somewhere in top 50 results of a search on “Wyatt Ehrenfels.” And some of this overachieving smut will rank in the Top 10 … clearly out of place … above authoritative Web sites … civilized discourse … and occasionally above my own web site. Anyone familiar with the so-called “edit wars” in Wikipedia’s faux encyclopedia understand what is meant when one of my stalkers remarks that “he who controls Google controls the world.”

The way I've been treated in Usenet is reminiscent of the manner in which I was treated in departments of Psychology as a graduate student back in the days before the Web even existed. You might think that as a graduate student, I carried around some soapbox sporting the image of a stylized bull’s-eye. But you might be surprised to learn that psychology professors, in the absence of behavioral evidence, would engage in a great deal of guesswork about what was going on in my head. They merely suspected that I thought or believed a certain way or, even more tenuously, that I did not think or believe in a manner they desired … and they just couldn't have it! (They often drew inferences about my attitudes from what I did not say or did not do in support of the program, its professors, and their pet theories, not unlike the practice of astronomers who inferred the existence of Black Holes from the gravitational flexing of adjacent stars). After I earned my Ph.D. in Social Psychology, I withdrew from academic life altogether, opting not to undertake the arduous (and potentially futile) journey to tenure-track employment. Much in the way I withdrew from Usenet, I suppose. But to this day many greedy and arrogant psych profs remain unsatisfied with this state of affairs (i.e. the old "We don't want you here" followed by "What?! What do you mean you're leaving us?!"). No, they don't attack my beliefs directly. Not once have they addressed themselves logically to the architecture of my critique, leaving me to wonder after all this time to what exactly these psychologists object and leaving me to wonder whether some of their non-degree holding handmaidens, many of whom have no affiliation with the field of Psychology, really object to anything beyond my self-promotional and self-presentational style. Remember, in the view of many of these self-styled kookologists, a kook is a kook is a kook, regardless of what the "kook" believes. I am fairly certain that some of the non-degree holding supplicants can't summarize my position with any greater precision than "he wants to reform Psychology." They don't know what I believe. They don't care what I believe. And they lack the training, education, or experience to evaluate my beliefs. They only know that I sound pretty ambitious, and they just enjoy the practice of adding to their kook catalogue new visitors who arrive with a passionate interest in promoting their perspective. Whatever the stalkers' purpose, they will attack me as long as my beliefs have life -- anywhere -- hoping to do Wyatt Ehrenfels the person damage so as to make him an infertile vessel and conduit for the beliefs. Though unsuccessful in their efforts to tie me down or tear me up, they managed to do enough damage to Usenet to make this collection of forums an inhospitable place for the exchange of ideas. Plan "C" no doubt. Scorched earth.

And sometimes it just doesn’t matter what you say nor how you say it. The evidence suggests I would have been stalked even if I had not sprinkled those 16 messages to sci.psychology.psychotherapy between May 18, 2001 and December 31, 2003. Sometimes it really does boil down to who you know. My fate was sealed when I devoted a page on my Web site to the critical psychology of Brad Jesness who, unbeknownst to me, had been engaged in a 6-year war of words with residents of the SPP flame community. I did not help my cause when I spurned demands that I expunge this Web page. And I noticed that my adversity reached a crescendo whenever favorable winds – and Google’s high tide -- carried my Web page into the coveted # 1 rank of a Google search on the name “Brad Jesness.” The gang went to extraordinary lengths to optimize each affiliate in the network of Web sites carrying a copy of the defamatory “Brad Jesness FAQ.” And not even Jesness can explain how this gang, which includes the owners of spam blacklists and the co-author of a book on Google hacking, periodically manages to send his Web site tumbling 6 or 7 pages in a search of his own name. Through lobbying, complaining, and possibly even hacking, the gang managed to assume nearly complete control of “Brad Jesness” as viewed through a search engine. My page, coupled with a new page addressing the abuse of Jesness, managed to snatch victory from the jaws of Jesness defeat. More often than not, these two documents occupy two of the top three spots (and currently rank higher than the anti-Jesness Web site bradjesness.com), threatening to nullify every one of 10,000 some odd records the gang worked so hard – and for so long – to put his reputation, employment, and safety at risk.

So 13 months into this by-and-large unprovoked belligerence, I decided to compose this report, not to harass my aggressors, but to simply offer visitors to my web site an opportunity to learn why the author of Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun, and the administrator of fireflySun.com, is being subjected to a campaign of defamation. While it is highly unlikely more than a fraction of visitors to my web site enter the news groups, I compose this rebuttal because search engines make visible to the public Usenet messages archived to the Web by smarmy news readers (click here for a list of some news readers). The necessity dawned on me the moment an old college buddy informed me he’d found a veiled death threat upon Googling me.

As I discuss in my Google Report, there was a time when Usenet posters toiled in virtual anonymity. Search engines only index web sites, and there was a time when the only way to access a news group was through a media company (or ISP) like AOL or directly through UNIX boxes and telephone lines. However, within the past few years there has been an epidemic of individuals providing access to the news groups through their web sites (i.e. "news readers").
When news readers give each news group message its own message ID and URL, each message functions as an independent web address, and is indexed as such by the search engines. Since these news readers boast heavy traffic, and since there are hundreds of external links in these messages, the search formulas of behemoths like Google give high ranks to these trashy posts. You may not be surprised to find that what some one insignificant belligerent wrote about you in a news group is more visible in the results of a Google search on your name than blurbs about you on reputable web sites and sporadically higher than even pages from your own web site.

News readers Supportalk.com, Chataboutcollege.com, Talkaboutpeople.com, and Chatabouthealth.com are distinct web sites offering access to many of the same Usenet news groups. They are both registered through Blue Razor Domains, Inc. and protected by the bulletproof hosting of the Scottsdale, Arizona-based Domains by Proxy, Inc, a division of "innovative" software development company GoDaddy.com. (GoDaddy’s SuperBowl commercial mocking last year's wardrobe malfunction must have confused innovation with testing the limits of moral tolerance in the most unimaginative way possible). Domains by Proxy markets its domain registration services to individuals who wish to avoid being identified, encouraging stalking and libel in the very name of protecting the privacy of families from stalking and harassment. This is from the Domains by Proxy web site: "The law requires that the personal information you provide with every domain you register be made public in the "WHOIS" database. Your identity becomes instantly available - and vulnerable - to spammers, scammers, prying eyes and worse. But now there's a solution: Domains By Proxy!"

What a Trojan horse!

Nevertheless, the most au•toch•tho•nous of the Usenet stalkers continue to defend their activities by insisting on a mythical distinction between Usenet and the Internet. Stalking and defamation laws, they insist, apply only to the Internet, and Usenet is (somehow) exempt. In other words, while everything the stalkers write about you ends up on billboards along the information highway, the stalkers claim immunity from liability and persecution. Interesting how each of the parties involved excuses themselves from legal responsibility for serial defamation and intimidation. Google Search staffers insist they are not legally responsible because they do not index news group posts. If the original author delivered a libelous message 'x-no-archive' (in which case it is set to 'self-destruct', so to speak, in 6 days), even he (or she) claims immunity from prosecution/litigation because he or she went to lengths to ensure the message is not archived. However, it is general practice in these cyberstalking gangs for a confederate to reply to the original message without setting the replying message to x-no-archive, thereby making the content of the original message available to the archives. So who's to blame for the libel now? Certainly not the gang member replying to the original message ... not if the reply to the original message itself contains no new libelous content. And if you believe the stalkers who claim Usenet is not the Internet, then it wouldn’t even matter whether or not the x-no-archive option was exercised.

Now you get the game.

The only party which cannot escape legal responsibility for the libel is the owner/ administrator of the Web-based news reader, and Google will refer complainants to the news reader. Only ... by some remarkable coincidence ... contact information for news reader administrators is hard to come by. Many news readers do not disclose contact information on the Web site itself and, as I have discovered, many more include misleading or inaccurate contact information. So ... the next step would be to plug the news reader's Web address into the WHOIS field of a database registration service like NetworkSolutions.com. According to The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) (the agency responsible for identifying and setting rules and minimum standards for the performance of domain registration functions), registry services must make publicly available on a "Whois" site information about who is responsible for domain names to allow rapid resolution of technical problems and to permit enforcement of consumer protection, trademark, and other laws. However, also by remarkable coincidence, the vast majority of these news readers are hosted by Domains by Proxy, Inc., the creature of GoDaddy.com which circumvents ICANN rules by providing its own contact information in the place of Web administrators desiring anonymity. While Domains by Proxy claims to offer these services to individuals seeking freedom from SPAM, I have no doubt Domains by Proxy officials are well aware that the market they are secretly tapping consists primarily of SPAMMERS and net abusers seeking a level of protection from their victims and the law. (Domains by Proxy requires complainants seeking information about the identity / location of a Web administrator address a certified letter to its Scottsdale, Arizona headquarters). Not that writing letters all day about their many 'clients' is a simple matter, but somehow I doubt it is a 'simple matter of writing a letter. Domains by Proxy, after instructing Mr. Jesness to mail a certified letter of complaint, subsequently denied being the host of the anti-Jesness domain bradjesness.com (even when all the domain registration services identify Domains by Proxy as the responsible service). Only after a volley of e-mails did Domains by Proxy staffers inform Jesness that the truly responsible service resides within another division of parent company GoDaddy.com. The e-mail bearing this news conveniently omitted details about the name and location of this division. It’s unclear whether GoDaddy is seedy by nature or whether there is any truth to the rumors that the administrator of bradjesness.com is a personal friend of a GoDaddy staffer. Even if this were true (the administrator buttressed speculation with occasional messages in which he reports visiting a friend in Scottsdale, AZ), it’s still a rather bold leap to claim tampering, but I suspect the stalking gang does not identify themselves as the cabal for nothing. When Jesness attempted to give another stalker a taste of this medicine by registering a domain in his target’s name, the domain registrant Yahoo acquiesced to complaints, pulling the plug on the domain within the week. I would be quite curious to learn how GoDaddy would respond to complaints about a Web site – registered through GoDaddy.com – that painted the bradjesness.com admin – putative paisan – in a similarly false or unflattering light.

Incidentally, Google is now directly indexing to its Web Search database Usenet messages through its Google Groups, which means Google attorneys found a legal loophole to improve on their already staggering arrogance and audacity.

Last but not least, as far as reasons for composing this report, I quite frankly find myself a bit seduced by the steady stream of self-incriminating evidence in anti-Ehrenfels messages to sci.psychology.psychotherapy (SPP). I have been providing a high-minded sociological critique of Psychology's policies and procedures, but seldom do individuals purporting to represent or defend the field of Psychology lavish me with real-time statements demonstrating all the prejudices I claim.

For the Sport Of It

So why do they do it? They attend to their stalking duties with a loyalty and longevity, but they’re not vesting a pension plan or shares in company stock. They don’t even get paid for the harm they cause others. I will take up the motives more extensively as this report unfolds, but the short answer is that we’re dealing with a group that gives its members both a sense of importance (i.e. kook hunting in the public interest) and the delicious notoriety associated with carrying out their objectives in an anonymously menacing fashion. By saving the world from irrational ideas and self-promotion, they can be “bad boys” “for the good of the public”. As they’re menacing their victims, they can also carve out their own idiosyncratic style while enjoying the benefits associated with membership in a gang (e.g. camaraderie, validation, and protection). These explanations however gloss over the secrets of each stalker’s individual psychology – the histories and intrapsychic factors that make these gangs so appealing.

I have received many e-mails from people wondering where these stalkers get their "nerve." This is a complex issue, with many factors contributing to their temerity, most notably social facilitation (i.e. participation of others with similar purposes) and technology-aided anonymity (i.e. use of aliases, remailing software, and forged headers). Through these methods, which I discuss more at length later in this report, the stalkers lose themselves in two important ways. It is quite a lesson in how behavior and thought deteriorate under a mask. It is how tragedies like the Holocaust and like the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, which require a degree of facelessness from its footsoldiers, are made. The gang stalking also harkens back to classic examples in which individual consciousness and morality is diluted in a collective (e.g. Salem Witch Trials, McCarthyism, and The Inquisition). Every once in awhile the news wires pick up on incidents in which loosely associated juveniles of varying levels of sobriety and delinquency inexplicably gather to beat and burn some homeless man beyond recognition.

Describing the mechanics of a cyberstalking ring in social psychological parlance, we're talking about the social facilitation of activities distributed across a collection of individuals who have surrendered their sense of personal identity (deindividuation) for a common persona centered on a myth of enforcement authority . And one of the benefits offered by the cyberstalking gang is the kind of technological and social protection that allows a person to stalk with impunity, which is something too good for even many licensed professionals to pass up. If you embarrass yourself, no problem ... no one knows who you are. If you are unmasked and threatened with indictment or litigation, rest assured your friends will pick up the slack and make life that much more precarious for your victims before your victims can relax or gloat over your reversal or fortune. That is ... until such time as you can pick up a new alias or forge a new header. And no matter what happens ... even if you're convicted of molesting a child ... you will have your friends' support and defense mechanisms at your disposal. For they will not allow the fact of your occasional posting to be clouded by thousands of their own off-topic posts. For they will not allow a little crime like child molestation to eclipse your criminal possession of unconventional wisdom. Possession is 9/10ths of the law, and dissemination of your view will earn you an effigy more shameful than selling crack to kids.

These 'kook-ologists' as they call themselves, members of a CABAL cell known as the 'Brotherhood of the Blood,' fashion themselves Internet police officers (i.e. net-coppers) responsible for unmasking and harassing individuals promoting perspectives with which they disagree. Imagine if ranking officials of an anti-spam company like a SpamCop decided to abuse their office by including -- in its blacklist of web sites hawking generic Viagra -- any web site they did not like for personal reasons. Imagine a group of Republicans (or Democrats) resorting to aggressive tactics to punish individuals promoting a Democratic (or Republican) point of view in a political message board. Well, if you can imagine these things, than you can imagine what is happening in sci.psychology.psychotherapy.

Roots in the Curio Jones Affair

But the resolve of this self-incorporating militia-like entity is also attributable to the success they enjoyed beating up on the mentally ill Diana Napolis, who under the alias of "Curio Jones," implicated specific individuals and services in the satanic ritual abuse of children. Napolis was the archetypal kook and easy target for kook hunters looking for a war they knew was just. Napolis was ultimately institutionalized for harassing and threatening Steven Spielberg and Jennifer Love Hewitt under the belief they were controlling her psychotronically, but not before she weaved the colorful cast of sci.psychology.psychotherapy into her delusions. And while the SPP stalkers (including some psychologists) found Napolis's public defeat and humiliation cause for celebration, any psychologist worth his salt would be sensitive to the responsibility of the stalkers in Napolis's deteriorating condition. By managing a menacing impression and leveraging their credibility as trained and credentialed members of the psychological community, the stalkers presented the perfect "hook" for projections of delusional fantasy. The stalkers' propensity for cybersleuthing, multiple pseudonyms (i.e. "sock puppets"), hacking, impersonation, and dissemination may have architected Napolis's delusions of psychotronic manipulation, nor did it help matters that a few of the stalkers are, or excel at playing, evangelical satanists. Rather than leaving the adjudication of her claims to the media and the courts, the stalkers took it upon themselves to use stress to pry open her vulnernabilities (i.e. predisposition to psychosis). It's not as though Napolis didn't ask for trouble, but what puzzles me is how psychologists with no official connections to the charges became so personally invested in her destruction. I also find it puzzling that psychologists and other self-styled stakeholders in Psychology with no connections to me -- people about whom I have never issued any kind of statement -- people with whom I have not exchanged a single word -- should become so personally invested in my destruction. And I'm no Diana Napolis!

When I think of the way these psychologists and their non-degree holding supplicants monitor the news groups (and the broader Internet) for signs of "kookery, arrogance, and deception," I am reminded of incidents in which the card carrying member of the National Rifle Association (armed with itchy trigger fingers and wallet-sized copies of the 2nd amendment) organizes the neighborhood watch program. This comparison was facilitated by recent reports that the prime suspect in the BTK serial murders is the president of Christ Lutheran Church Council and a rather zealous compliance supervisor in the Wichita suburb of Park City, positions of authority over which he exerts a control similar to that he enjoyed over his victims. The beastly evil underneath the altruistic facade of community service. Similarly, we find among the cyber-magnates recruiting for the stalking ring a forensic psychologist who regularly testifies to competencies in court, a computer forensics expert and hacker who recently published an IT reference manual, and a group of individuals who serve as moderators of a venerable news group. The judgment against Diana Napolis (and ultimately her remanding to a psychiatric hospital) reinforced the aggressive tactics of the psychologists in sci.psychology.psychotherapy, helped them frame a benign-to-benevolent, community-oriented rationale for their actions, and emboldened them to broaden the scope of their "watch" beyond SPP and beyond Usenet. They became Raders in their own right.

The stalkers did not seem to appreciate the use of the Curio Jones alias by the then-unidentified Diana Napolis and resorted to rather extraordinary measures to sleuth her identity (including a jaunt to her residence by an irascible member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation armed with a hidden camera, a non-degree holding supplicant, and a reporter from the San Diego Tribune. The SPP stalkers complained about Napolis's use of an alias, and now that she is "off the streets," they have become the alias's greatest practitioner.

The SPP stalking ring was emboldened by the Napolis outcome, demonstrating that the "cure for Curio" may actually be worse than the disease. They now act as if their stalking serves an official capacity (i.e. kookology in the public interest), and they boast of how their victims, anyone critical of the status quo in Psychology, will suffer damage to their reputations. Victims of the stalking, using terms like "spooks," "scarecrows," "gangbangers," and "ghouls" to describe the stalkers, depict an exhibition of subversive officiousness the likes of which haven't been seen since some militia groups made it fashionable for a brief period in the mid 90s. And the ultra wide net cast by the stalkers seizes on any one with any kind of criticism of Psychology. Despite their claim to target spammers, I have not seen them harass any of the individuals who hit the news groups to hawk generic Viagra. But anyone with an academic critique of Psychology's policies and procedures gets the Diana Napolis treatment.

From Curio Jones to Brad Jesness

To the casual observor, it would appear many contributors to sci.psychology.psychotherapy (SPP), resigned to the fact they could not exorcise the intermittent postings of Psychology critic Brad Jesness, decided to wallpaper the forum with ribald shock jock-caliber barbs. Like throwing water on a grease fire, Brad's detractors fanned his flames well beyond their intrinsic fuel. Jesness matched tits with tats, and thus was born a 6-year war of words with a Wrestlemania marquee: "Anonymous via the Tonga Cyberpunks Remailer" vs. "Yomamma Bin Crawdaddin," "The Psyko," and "Iceman" not to mention "Kali," the alias of a graduate student in Psychology which has been translated by various persons as "goddess of death," "goddess of fear," and "goddess of destruction." I think I see a pattern emerging here. The struggle between Brad Jesness and a small group of psychotherapists representing fringe elements of the field (and non-degree holding supplicants) cluttered the boards with acerbic and off-topic posts that effectively made a men's room wall of this 'news group' (har har). While I confess that I do not understand why Brad demanded access to a dubious venue in which he was clearly unwanted, I am doubly bemused by the ring of thugs for resorting to violent methods of managing the flow of information favorable to their opinions. Having persuaded Brad that he was embroiled in a war without victories or exit strategies (conjuring images of patrolling the Vietnamese jungle), I helped Brad to move on, and thus in one way, you would expect SPP patrons to apply gentleness when speaking my name.

However, they remain distressed by the search-optimized page of my Web site that houses some of Mr. Jesness’s criticisms of the field. Mr. Jesness may not be a stalker like Curio Jones, but his criticisms of Psychology nonetheless provided the defenders of the status quo in sci.psychology.psychotherapy with a means to expand their hobby. Brad Jesness gave the hobby of wannabe watchdogs new life ... but even as the attacks on Jesness paled in necessity and importance to those on Curio Jones, they exceeded their predecessors in hostility and consequence.

Jumping the Shark: From Brad Jesness to Wyatt Ehrenfels

A New Disorder Is Born

Somewhere between Curio Jones and Brad Jesness roams a shark the stalkers love to jump. And as we get closer to the shoreline, we find between Brad Jesness and other victims like Wyatt Ehrenfels a spate of smaller but more jumpable sharks. The stalking of Curio Jones in the public interest deteriorated into a practice of saving the world from irrational ideas, unwanted e-mail, and personality characteristics (i.e. kook hunting). So tenuous is this enterprise that the stalkers attack not individuals hawking generic Viagra in indiscriminate e-mails to the masses, but they attack individuals who exhibit personality characteristics associated with the kook / spammer / abuser syndrome. The problem is: the individuals attacked are not spammers, and the stalkers demonize as arrogance, officiousness, and irrationality what are reasonable and productive levels of independent thinking, civic participation, and enthusiasm for ideas.

The kook hunters / stalkers want the world to believe they have a practical dispute with Wyatt Ehrenfels, which is to say, with what is depicted as fraudulence, arrogance, and deception. But with the exception of an inaccurately projected release date (i.e. the publication of Ehrenfels's Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun was delayed), the stalker's account never gets any less obscure than references to "lies" on the book's web site. Allegations of deception and fraudulence baffled the members of one focus group. "I can't imagine what he [Ehrenfels]'s supposed to be lying about," remarked one observer. "He's not claiming toxic levels of hexavalent chromium in the psych department water cooler. The web site consists of opinions. Educated opinions. But obviously a point of view." Ehrenfels summed up the reactions as follows: "So if Professor Plum did use the candlestick to murder Colonel Mustard in the psych department men's room, I didn't break the story."

Having said that, there are people out there who have a profound sensitivity to and intolerance for other people’s points of view. This is the “keep your opinion to yourself” disorder, a psychogenic cousin of Tourette’s in which an individual is deeply disturbed by all sources of unconventional wisdom and cannot resist the impulse to lash out publicly at the source. They are sensitive to (and threatened by) pride and passion in others, they work to discredit (or decry as sheer disingenuousness) just about any idea that is not a facticity, finding, axiom, or object, and they seem to need reassurance from their peers that the public offering of a private point of view is inappropriate. One aspect to this disorder is the contempt for products of processes that reside within an individual. These people are deeply disturbed by the combination of the idiosyncratic and immaterial. They don’t like anything introspective, casually reflective, armchair epistemological, or pre-ideological. Now don’t get me wrong. I'm not averse to facts. Facts are facts. And facts are great. It's not like I don't appreciate a good mathematical proof, self-evident truth, smoking gun, confession, a finding that has been corroborated a thousand times over, or objects visible to the naked eye. But I also don’t think that I need permission from a committee of credentialed peers before discussing anything that doesn’t fall into one of these categories. And what a rum life it would be if I did. In the age where freedom of speech is invoked to protect stalking, I’m amazed by this undercurrent of opposition to the promotion of ideas, and I am flummoxed that many of the people who oppose the development and promotion of ideas are the same people who invoke the First Amendment to attack those who drop such an idea on a listserv or news group. This performance-enhanced strain of sensitivity and skepticism is spreading like Road Rage on the Web. Every listserv, every news group, every message board, has at least a half dozen of these village cranks.

Roots in a Personality Conflict

But are the claims of arrogance and deception really disingenuous propaganda? Or is there something beneath what we see as conscious strategies to malign Ehrenfels? Ehrenfels offered an alternative explanation of his own. "We do not always act or feel things for the reasons we think, and I wish to at least consider that this one stalker’s allegations of lies are not what they appear to be -- lies themselves -- but that there may be some self-deception on his part that he projects on to me. Let's examine the motive which is really behind the apparent objection. This is the base of the matter -- what is really at the root of this stalker's psyche where I'm concerned. What am I to him? After pouring over hundreds of messages from this fellow in the news groups (dating back to 1997), it did not escape my attention that he and I have some extraordinary similarities. It makes for a highly volatile mix of similarities and dissimilarities. A lot of those combustible relationships out there -- when you really examine them -- the persons are not truly opposites -- there is always something shared -- something so fundamental as to be hidden to both of them."

Ehrenfels not only did not feel comfortable commenting on the similarities, but suspects it is this holding back, this concern with his public persona, that gets him in trouble. "He's offended. He senses that I do not like some things I know to be a part of my nature or human inheritance, and he takes it as a personal rejection. And it is this rejection that is really behind the charges of deception and arrogance that you and I misconstrue as bizarre or dishonest. Being so brazenly open about himself is who he is. One South American psychoanalyst wrote that what he found so remarkable about this fellow was his overwhelming need to express himself. Paradoxically, the anonymity afforded by forged headers and aliases in Usenet, which others cite as evidence of his hypocrisy, in reality allows him not only to be more open about himself, but to open up the lives of others. Thousands of messages. Thousands of flames. Many vulgar. Many part of an effort to strip others of their aliases, cybersleuth facts about their lives, and expose them to the world. This guy wears everything on his sleeve but his name, rank, and serial number. And he demands no less from you. By contrast, I do not forge my headers or use remailers to disguise my identity. But I do withhold details about my personal Psychology that I feel are impertinent or not palatable for the public.

This guy has watched me carefully craft my persona as an author and anti-establishment iconoclast, and this craftsmanship is what rankles him. He senses that he and I are similar in ways that are not clear to him, and it is this subliminal perception of similarity that fuels his persecution of the more obvious dissimilarities. And it's what lends the disproportion to his actions and feelings where I'm concerned. It's not entirely unlike the kind of mystical grip that binds your Hinckleys to your Fosters, but unlike your cases of romantic fantasies, in this case of hostility, it's the similarity (and not the dissimilarity) that sits below the threshold of awareness. It's also quite possible that by attempting to portray me publicly as an arrogant liar, he seeks to bring out the worst in me -- to use the language offensive to him -- which in the context of this discussion means that he seeks to bring our similarities to the surface. To peel away the positive and rational elements of my presentation to find a seething cauldron of resentments beneath that make sense to him. And truth be told, I am motivated in part by an outrage for what happened to me and also for what happened to the science of dreams. But I can put together an affirmative movement in clear conscience because of the truly constructive elements in my vision for a more effective science of Psychology. Though this has never been a movement to destroy, my stalker seeks to find personal vindication in reducing my image to one of bitter loser. Critical to his effort is coaxing me into returning to Usenet, to partake in flame wars. He has written that he predicts I will return to Usenet in two years time. After driving me from Usenet by following me around the news groups, he complained that I address his stalking from behind my own walls (i.e. this web page). And while after a year of harassment and defamation he has clearly succeeded in compelling me to speak of him, he will never compel me to speak to or to speak like him. He has reached the limits of what he can accomplish.

Stalking Self-Medicating

Since the release of this report, the stalkers have had to pull double duty repairing their own image. The few psychologists who once posted under their own name have since disappeared only to re-emerge under aliases. A series of aliases (Monica Lake, Homer, Henry, Mart, Marty, and James) recently and coincidentally posted from the same address (har har) to pay relentless homage to the physical beauty, intelligence, and overall "invincibility" of the stalker posting the messages -- a doctoral candidate from Northern Illinois elected by her accomplices as "officer in charge of kooks and trolls". There's no greater sign of desperation. Not unless you want to count a stalker's recent declarationthat the report you are reading now reflects poorly on its author. But this is probably just a sign of how out of touch these stalkers are with public sense and sensibility.

"How is it," you ask, "that the flow of ignominies from psych profs has been so steady?" Well, it's not so surprising when you consider the stakes. Some marketing specialists working for pharmaceutical companies perpetually stake out some of the support news groups waiting to unleash their campaign of defamation and intimidation on the next "kook" to author a post questioning the efficacy or morality of psychopharmacology (a la Tom Cruise). Those shilling for this or that drug resort to stalking because they stand to lose when some outspoken opponent of drugs sounds off on the largest, most decentralized user network in the world -- a world of once secret stalking societies into which Google Groups and Google Web offers a Times Square like peephole. (It's not called "Go Ogle" for nothing). Now these once secret stalking societies evolved into open societies with secrets and societies of members with secret identities.

But the motive for jealously and aggressively guarding the reputation of Psychology's academic and professional communities is far more, well, 'psychological' than that of pharmaceutical lobbyists. Not only do psych profs and practitioners feel their reputations are bound up with the reputation of their profession; but in many cases, owing to a phenomenon I discuss on my web site, they behave as though their identities and the public perception/professional persona of Psychology are one and the same. So they subject to some measure of harassment anyone who posts an opinion or point of view that contradicts, presents an alternative, or detracts from the significance of, what is accepted by psychology professors.

Stalking Self-Medicating

But what psychology professors do in Usenet, and with the assistance of non-degree holding supplicants and cyberpunks with criminal and psychiatric histories, is not exotic. It is just an extreme form of the professional gatekeeping they routinely exercise as administrators of graduate training programs. Take for example the way they slander their graduate students, some of whom are in excellent academic standing, in their end-of-academic-term evaluation meetings. In the name of such tasteful things as ethics, professionalism, perfect fit, and standards, many psych profs draw violent inferences about the character of graduate students whose views they find unconventional, all while showing little-to-no interest in prosecuting genuine breaches of morality and lawfulness not indexed in their ethics code (or breaches perpetrated by colleagues or students they like). Here characterological assessment and worse ... character assassination, perpetuated and proliferated among faculty by groupthink, masquerades as regular performance evaluation ... but in reality, a cover for the practice of identifying the students that least fit in. If such practices can be collectively summarized under the term "professional gatekeeping," then this report documents a mind-bogglingly steroid-enhanced form of "gatekeeping for sport." Only this is not your run-of-the-mill academic gatekeeping, for the keepers discussed in this report, hailing from both the amateur as well as professional ranks, guard the gates of the Internet. And while they aim to deny you a public audience and disrupt your activities on the Internet, they also seek to put you in harm's way.

In a message titled "swatting fireflies" (a reference to my novel Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun) one stalker gloated over a court ruling denying a University of Montana graduate student with a 3.86 grade point average that he was unfairly dismissed from his clinical psychology training program. What message is the stalker sending here? Sounds to me like he is less invested in the truth as it applies to this case than he is in my personal satisfaction (or lack of it). This is an extension of a stalker's trademark obsession: the victim becomes the center of a complex that architects a growing proportion of the stalker's attitudes and behaviors until the stalker's appearance itself begins to resemble that of a splinter personality, a one-dimensional character in someone's dream. (Coincidentally, this stalker always enjoyed remarking that he would deliver my "nightmare").

Another objective of this report is to lay waste to a popular myth that psychologists travel an analytical 'high road' on which they are at every point free of emotion. This report not only indicates that among our academics and professionals are psychologists who cannot manage their own high-octane insecurities, frustrations, and base motives, but also that in subverting rational decision-making and presentation for these emotions, a group of mental health providers operating on the sci.psychology.psychotherapy "news group" (SPP) have jeopardized the peace, safety, and freedom of upstanding citizens. Aptly dubbed "gang-bangers" by one commentator, the mental health professionals comprising this SPP cyberstalking ring have coordinated "ghoulish" attacks on their intended targets, prompting appeals to law enforcement, calls for legislation by a U.K. researcher, and moving the most recently dismayed victim of their organized belligerence to write, "I was unwilling to accept that the mental health professionals cyberstalking or cyberharassing me were NUTS."

The victim is right to feel this way. Some of these professionals (and even some of the non-degree-holding supplicants) are squandering the gift of above-average intelligence on pursuits motivated by pride, pathology, and idle boredom. I am willing to go so far as to claim that the intelligence of this group exceeds that of Psychology's academic and professional community. But you get the sense from all the infantilism that the intelligence itself is a delivery device for purposes that express insecurities and other emotional issues that predate the development of that intelligence (i.e. childhood). This would explain the two methods of self-presentation between which the stalkers oscillate. On the one hand, you have the vulgar posts that remind me of third grade toiletry humor with a hint of inhibited intelligence just beneath the surface, and then you have the posts in which the stalkers attempt to use an intelligent and professional persona to advance an utterly infantile idea (e.g., the thread in which the stalkers shop around the moderated sci.psychology.psychotherapy group the theory that the behavior of "net kooks" can be explained with a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder.

Think how much better the stalker's own time would be spent, how much better their own skill development would be served, how much better off society would be, if only Sony Computer Entertainment had put them on the donor list for a Playstation 2. Many of you will struggle at first to comprehend the state-of-affairs I am describing. Psychologists? Stalking?...Really?! But I have no doubt that having read this report from end to end, you will have understood how life on SPP evolved from a seething cauldron of primordial impulses in pre-lectronic Usenet...in how the hostilities were maintained by technological and social sources of anonymity...and in how the Internet turned a closed Usenet system (i.e. antediluvian Usenet) into an open community into which fresh victims, fresh audiences, and fresh recruits can be supplied by a network of news readers and search behemoths. (In my report, Google Too Sleazy for the Street, I discuss the McDonald's of the Internet ("Searching 4,285,199,774 web pages") and the reckless and indiscriminate hoarding of all things searchable ("billions and billions served") reflected appropriately in the very name "Go Ogle."

As I mentioned above, while I cannot condone the stalkers' methods and proportions, I have no trouble fathoming how I brought their disenchantment down on my head. For three years now I have managed a web site raising awareness of those policies and procedures within Psychology's academic and professional communities that behave like prejudices, obstructing an adequate exploration of dreams and other phenomena close to the heart of the human condition. I have been known to tack to a church door or two a la Luther a monthly thesis (or link to one) that addresses the shortfalls of the academic and professional community, but I never attack anyone personally in a discussion forum. And I never needed to. My agenda for restoring conceptual freedom, phenomenological fidelity, and Science's transdisciplinary fundamentals to Psychology draws an occasional complaint from the village grouch, grumbling something about "using the forum as a bulletin board," but I never aroused so much distress as that from the touchy and territorial residents of the SPP "news group" who ironically use angry vulgarities, libel, and threats to gang attack anyone with an opinion about mental health. Just about all reaction to my web site from the Usenet communities was not logical refutation of my view, but rather ritualized shouting-down of someone accused of forbidden thoughts. History teaches us that it is often the forbidden thoughts that people most need to hear. This group-facilitated aggression under the cloak of anonymity bares a striking contrast to the reaction of reputation-obsessed professors in the Psychology wing of the ivory tower, who do what they do best with facts and analysis that contravene their views: they ignore them. Characterizing the emotional underpinnings of the malicious campaign in Usenet is not a simple task, but if it could talk, it would say something to the effect of "we didn't let you represent the field of Psychology (i.e., a reference to my improbability of landing one of the rare tenure-track professorships). We're sure not going to allow you to question it." Anyway, the way I figure it, while significant reforms might open up Psychology to persons like myself with an interest in studying dreams (and the associated ideas and qualities necessary to meet this challenge), it is too late to save my psychology career, so the primary purpose of my book, web site, and cable access program has never been anything other than serving the phenomena I love dearly (i.e. dreams). Well, then there's also the matter of sparing or preparing others like me whose interests and qualities, like mine, might prove problematic for their training and employment.

For all this, I, and many others seeking reform of our academic and professional communities, have been subjected to a unique form of visceral harassment by Psychology's "rotten apples." I am not talking about the kind of fiercely rational discrediting and protectionist censorship of professional gatekeepers. If you want to understand how I am criticized by ultra-scientist types who'd sooner look for sleep spindles in tadpoles than so much as glance at dream diaries, feel free to check out most of the other links on my web site. But if you enjoy snooping around crypts and peeking into crackhouse windows, you might want to read this report, which from a safe distance delves into the para-professional and para-critical methods deployed by therapists and non-degree holding supplicants in the shadows of Usenet's unmoderated and unfortunately-named "news groups." With special attention to sci.psychology.psychotherapy, which resembles a public bathhouse more than an informational forum, this report treads lightly in the beginning, taking up rather innocuous message board behavior, before foraging into a high-level view of what amounts to behavior deemed criminal (class 1 misdemeanor harassment) by a detective from the Northern Virginia Violent Crimes Division.

Maintaining Factors in Stalking

When someone embarks on the stalking path, he usually allays his fear of losing self-control by reassuring himself he will not cross this or that "line." But as he becomes more invested in the stalking, more tied to the life of the target (in whose life the stalker doubtlessly finds elements lacking in his own life), the emotions are amplified by the tension associated with the rapidly approaching line. At this point, the hedonically charged stalker begins to realize that the only thing standing between him and the next "rush" (bound to be the biggest rush yet), is his own self-imposed restriction, which he then sets aside. Having moved the "line" once, the stalker numbs himself to the fear of consequences, and at that point, the stalking becomes a run-away train.

Group stalking is a unique phenomenon that combines individual pathology with the worst elements of collective (i.e. mob) behavior, as illustrated by the inspired compliance of Nazi soldiers at Auschwitz and a few American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. I know some stalkers who'd like to think these analogies cheapen my argument, but my Ph.D. in Social Psychology qualifies me to say, "if the shoes fit...". While the lone stalker relies on secrecy for inspiration and cover, the "sock puppets" in SPP operate not only under the cover provided by their aliases and spoofed or re-routed IPs, but also under the diffusion of responsibility offered by the group. In the group they find not only the inspiration, justification, and precedent for stalking, but they also find additional safeguards against detection & culpability.

Stalking / Defamation as a Tag-Team Sport

A Strategic Division of Labor

SPP stalkers parse the responsibility for the criminal activity so that law enforcement will be more likely to decide the misdemeanor is not worth the work required to isolate the single culpable source or to identify multiple sources. Moreover, while the activities combine to form a misdemeanor when we consider the consequences to the victim, the division of labor among SPP patrons for the activities has the effect of "parsing" the crime into non-criminal units, or "crumbs." This is how it works. SPP stalker 1 may use electronic surveillance to illicitly procure a target's work address (or financial assets). SPP stalker 2 posts that sensitive information x-no-archive to Usenet to skirt culpability (such a post is not archived in Google or any other ISP and is set to expire within Usenet after a period of about 2 weeks). SPP stalker 3 replies to the x-no-archive post, but does so without the x-no-archive tag, so the response, which contains the work address, is publicly archived in the hopes a lurking 'SPP stalker 4' will act concretely on that information to the material detriment of the target. Because SPP stalker 2 claims impunity due to his or her good faith effort to keep the post from view of the public (including the target), and because SPP stalker 3 denies authorship of the original post that bears the most malicious material, a crime does not appear to have been committed (at least according to their way of thinking). And a crime has indeed not been committed, that is, until SPP stalker 4 does his thing, at which point law enforcement may be willing to get involved. Just as stalker 1 and 2 collaborate on denials of culpability by dividing the labor, so Google claims it is not responsible for the Usenet posts that show up in its archives. In this way, the criminal partnership between stalker 1 and 2 is mirrored at the institutional level between Usenet and Google, Siamese twins conjoined at the college dorm room (Usenet was born at Duke University). While I have been cynical with respect to the willingness of law enforcement to enforce stalking legislation, I should add here that in recent weeks there has been a rising tide of anti-stalking sentiment in the news spurred by California's tough new cyberstalking laws. It is in many states a misdemeanor to make a person feel that he or she is continually living under a threat, and the public is beginning to realize that it is just a bit heinous to advise those complaining about cyberstalking to "switch off their PCs." I am also pleased to announce that this report is being consulted by the top brass of watchdog groups participating in the research and development of federal cyberstalking legislation.

The objective of the stalkers is to intimidate a person they have labeled a 'kook' from posting to "their" forum. However, at the same time, the stalkers do not want to cut off the supply of thrills and sense of control -- that cheap rush -- to which they have become addicted. The stalkers need to know that the 'kook' will continually follow their work even after he or she has been intimidated into 'response paralysis.' By continuing to menace their targets well after the targets stopped contributing, the stalkers intend to make the victim feel that by switching off his or her PC (or by leaving Usenet), the victim is blinding him- or herself to what the stalkers may be plotting. This is how the stalkers maintain their hold on someone. If you dare ignore them, and someone shows up at your door or sends false and libelous information to friends, family, business partners (web host) or the public at large, you may regret having denied yourself access to the warning signs (in much the same way the US Government would regret not monitoring the world's communications for terrorist 'chatter'). What I find most interesting about this form of stalking is that some of the perpetrators are therapists and some of the victims are, or have been, therapy clients. The stalkers love hanging DSM diagnostic labels on their victims as part of their efforts to disqualify and disenfranchise and, assuming they really believe in their diagnoses, they behave like police officers who spend their off duty hours at sniper camp. They seem to enjoy heaping breaking-point stress on those 'kooks' they suspect have emotional vulnerabilities.

If a crime is committed, not only are stalkers 1 through 4 culpable, but anyone else in the group aware of the criminal activity can be charged as an accomplice if they do not alert authorities to the crime or offer what they know about the criminals. Many of the residents of SPP deserve to be called stalkers by virtue of their efforts to foment hostilities where none existed or to augment the threat to a target by challenging a known belligerent to make good on his or her threat. Nevertheless, it may be useful to criminalize the passive-aggressive co-dependencies by writing legislation (not unlike that proposed by Senator John Kerry [D-Mass]) aimed at making the whole gang accountable for violent members and for consequences emerging from the group dynamics. Naturally, this begs the question: Are the stalkers in SPP a gang? Given the actual and potential consequences of their behaviors and the coordination among them in pursuit of a singular purpose (to distress, disrupt, or impair others), I would have to say that gang label is a perfect fit for the SPP stalkers. Some of these "individuals" have known one another and formed strategic partnerships well before the birth of the Internet and ISPs that offer access to Usenet and its "news groups" (e.g. Google). In any event, SPP stalkers are perfectly willing to share the risk of prosecution in the unlikely event of material harm to a target. The risk is simply worth the hours of entertainment and upmanship vicariously derived from every threatening and libelous post. Mmm. Mmm. Pass the dip!

But don't get me wrong. What they are doing is almost universally regarded as criminal. I am talking about the sustained and socially facilitated campaign of threats & aspersions that endure well past any imagined provocation or participation on the part of the target into an unforseen horizon, at times looming over the victim as threats to meddle into and disrupt personal affairs and even impinge on his or her physical integrity. Well, no harm done, yet. The stalkers are well aware of the fact their offenses are not widely regarded as actionable and are perceived as antecedents of true crime, providing the motivation and information necessary (but seldom sufficient) for a criminal act. But the growing number of misdemeanors in SPP has that look of a balloon that's always ready to burst into felony behavior. Among the stalkers in SPP are persons with criminal and psychiatric histories. While tempers flare, tolerance wears thin. And stalkers are always looking for creative ways to raise the stakes to rise to the level of their tolerance to the stalking drug. And as new stalkers are added to the rolls, some who feel lost in the herd feel they need to make an even more extraordinary contribution to the "fight," as evidenced by an emerging class of "field correspondents" who are at least pretending to travel great distances to describe the bushes in their target's back yard. Through persistent misdemeanors and violations of civil law, the SPP stalkers expose their prey to an unmanageable risk of felony crimes from an inestimable number of lurkers. Hmm. You just know they're rooting for someone to assume the risk and act on the personal information they post for public view, usually in the midst of other posts designed elicit anger for the target.

Stalking Escalation Procedures

The stalkers like to play with their victims in the same way premorbid antisocial personalities like to pull the legs off insects. Local law enforcement agreed the "veiled threats of murder" in the following string of posts require heightened vigilance and documentation. On August 8, 2004, the linchpin in the cyberstalking apparatus, after an uncharacteristic 3-day hiatus, posted the following (titled "Brad has no clue") from a new IP address (other than the one connected with semi-daily posts to Usenet and visits to my web site):

On the road, and were am I? eh? J00 stuupid shit, are you watching the cemetary near j00 house?

I contacted Brad Jesness through his web site in an effort to determine whether the cyberstalking target (and subject of the news group alt.brad.jesness.die.die.die) thought this swashbuckling stalker extraordinaire had actually posted from a laptop near Brad's residence. Brad reported his belief that the individual in question described property details available only to someone with carnal knowledge of the property. In his very next post titled "Fireflies" (a reference to the title of my book), the stalker continued to regale his friends in Usenet with his journey into the heart of "kook country":

In case you didn't follow that, the author writes "Guess I killed me bout a couple hundred so all is not lost. I am right, they don't glow in the shadows, seen best in the dark. Easier to destroy as well. They do squish all funnaa too! And am very close to the source. LOL Hoof prints, ESAD you freakish old hag."

[ALIAS PROTECTED] PhD
Killing the little globugs in mass ATM, lol
{1tnd1cegwq3xw$.plwzbq5rvbna$.dlg@40tude.net} {2004-08-09}

The graduate student reinforces the thread, keeping the discussion going in a post asking him to confirm his jaunt into the "heartland" -- a post to which our 'traveler' responds as follows:

"Went ahead and got me a GPS for the MH, I can not get the exact co-ordinates of any place I visit. Useful for logging and spying from the sky. :) Oh yeah, and for travel it's great. Well a little east of that, I think. :( Humid and warm, not my cup of tea. It's getting easier and easier to off the little buggers."

In a post a couple months later (2004-10-13), our traveler takes issue with my reference to his cross-country trip in this web report (i.e. my phrase "emerging class of field correspondents"):

"You, self made paranoid idiot, so I killed a few glo bugs. BFD, you stretched into something else? Why? Had I arrived if I had chosen to do so you would never know. Stupid idiot, your phone number is all over the net, have you received any calls? I'd bet not. Why? no one gives a shit. As to your address, its no big secret, still no one gives a shit. Certainly not I. There has been no threats upon your person at any time, is this something you pulled out of your dreams/nightmare? Yuppers, for it dwells in no other place. You have been outed, you stupidly thought you were hiding behind a nym, while at the same time posting obvious references to yourself in order to gain your "proper recognition". In plain speak you are a XXXXing idiot. Your LART FAQ will show you for what you are, any of the Prof's and other pertinent peeps will clearly see that you sought, with counsel of the one who bears your name to deceive the collegiate community in Washington. (state, you freak, lest you think it has to do with DC.) There is no reason to moderate, you tell lies on your web site, you use defamatory information which is not true, and you attempt to malign peeps with wrong info gained from other mal delusioned freaks. I assume you already know what an idiot you are based on what you write and how you try to cover tracks in advance based on my hints of what is to come. I scoff at your feeble attempts to counteract the truth. You dance like an old, old lady, wobbling around like a bobbly head. You get all pissy with Google (and there are many other search engines) for making it possible to find the shit you wrote, you hold them accountable, yet it was you who wrote it. If it appears to make you look stupid, weak, and insignificant? LOL, Well..you wrote it, deal with it. Don't even bother to blame someone else for your stupidity, it just makes you look more the fool. D'oh! Here's a wurd of advice: Don't even think of doing drugs, given your penchant for nightmares and not dreams it would most likely lead to very bad trips. OTH, think of the fright factor, it could enhance your feeling of inferiority. Come to think of it.... Do you know why you have an inferiority complex? 'cause your inferior. Duh! Mebbe you need another XXX kicking from the one who bears your name so you can get a life. Nah, she should just kick your XXX for the hell of it. Now..go do the dishes like a good house husband, and don't forget to wash her panties with special care."

When he thought he uncovered the identity of Wyatt Ehrenfels (an associate contracted to relay Wyatt's posts to the Internet), he not only subjected the name of the associate to the same treatment, but also his wife (upon finding a photo of her in an Internet search):

"I was thinking today about this regarding a previous post. Since you claim (once again) that your book will be published shortly and as usual a *few* things have yet to be done. I am considering delaying your RL [real life] outing until after it has gone to press. LOL Which means that JWE's nym will be on it, not yours. Then I will reveal it. *snicker* but mebbe sooner, who knows? Oh yes, Bedside books, the purported publisher of your 1st book until things changed, is a Vanity Publisher. The not yet registered nor official so-called ISBN numbers are just those assigned to the publisher for future usage. None of these in regards to your rags are official or fully registered. Being as the current sub division has various plans available to all who cannot be published otherwise, and you have not as requested posted the details of a contract one only can assume it is still in the vanity stage as it is now two years in the running with this sub division. I am wondering if a certain person is still blonde, is she? You know, the one who actually had an internship! LOL Oh da joy of de New Year! /me does happy dance!

-- [ALIAS PROTECTED] PhD
Turning dreams into nightmares, a mere twisted shadow of their former self.

But trailblazing-type stalkers like the one described above are the exception. As I mentioned earlier, most SPP cyberstalking chamelions drape themselves in the abstract swirls of the news groups's paisley wallpaper. By the accounts of most witnesses, they appear to speak with one voice, their ranting and guffawing blending into the monochromatic sea of rhetorical red froth. The flip side of the coin (the sword's other edge, the bitter's sweetness) is that it is just as difficult for any one of the stalkers, even the self-styled 'glo-bug killer,' to stand out as a coherent and credible counterweight to the so-called "kooks" they struggle to defuse. The flame wars have this perennial stench of stalemate, about as intriguing and productive as the idea of Olympic tic-tac-toe, making Usenet's cyberstalking industry about as musty and mingy as it is malicious. Unhinged by their loathing of Ehrenfels -- these medieval jousters, enlisted as appendages of the Psychology advocacy apparatus, raise their collective lance, piercing nothing but windmill-like substance. The cacophony of defamatory posts delivered improvidently by this faction of Net Psychology and delivered with mind-numbingly metronomic regularity, creates a dispiriting static that overwhelms at first glance anyone seeking to dissect the history of this menacing and disruptive hate speech. But while this casts a haze over the culpability of the individual stalker, it also works to the advantage of those who argue criminal negligence on the part of the services that hook its users up to these message boards. I am speaking here of those news readers that provide web access to Usenet.

The Axis of Evil

Search behemoths (most notably Google), Usenet news groups (most notably psychologists on sci.psychology.psychotherapy), and the news readers, have joined forces to build a defamation delivery system, otherwise known as the Defamation Superhighway, in reference to the ease in which defamatory material can be disseminated on the Web.

All parties attempt to deflect responsibility for the defamation on to some other entity. Google refers me to the news readers, and in so doing, feeds me to the stalkers who developed some of these things. Google also suggests I blame them as well. And as for my stalkers, well, they blame me for being the person I am. But it is not my responsibility to change who I am and what I believe, and news readers that circumvent disclosure laws cannot be held accountable either, not without an attorney and a good private detective. As for Google, well, Google recently informed me that if I compelled them by legal document to alter their archives in any way, which includes removing some post with no value beyond its potential for threat and libel, they would forward my name and documentation to an enemies of free speech web site for black listing (i.e. chillingeffects.org). Sounds like a threat to me.

By creating an anonymous front for news readers, Domains by Proxy joins the Axis of Evil as a bullet proof web host. Domains by Proxy devised an innovative solution to the law. Break it.

It is a perfect marriage, the one between Domains by Proxy, Google, Usenet, and the network of news servers that multiply the white light from Usenet into a spectrum of web sites for the Google search engine. I too once championed the right to complete anonymity on the Internet, that is, until it became all to plain that these services make spamming and cyberstalking possible and provide no protection to the victims. Isn't it interesting that the most vocal defenders of freedom and privacy are those who depend on it to break laws or generally inflict harm on others?

Like many news readers (e.g. pych-one.com), The Chat about Network web site and The Out Support Forums web site (AlltheSupport.com) web site are hosted by Domains by Proxy, contain no valid contact information, and provide false contact information to "WHOIS" databases.

Oh, the Chat about Network talks tough on legality. It's Terms of Service, designed exclusively to protect -- guess who? -- the Chat about Network, reads like an operations manual for the Department of Defense.

But when it's all said and done...

The company is apparently based in Virginia, but Domain Registration information directs your correspondence to Arizona-based Domains by Proxy. Domains by Proxy replied to a solicitation for legitimate contact information. In the reply, Domains by Proxy required that requests connected with legal issues be delivered by certified mail.

We also notice the same abusive evasiveness and deception by Domains-by-Proxy client allthesupport.com:

At first, I try to reach them through the e-mail address advertised on the web site as a point of contact:

When that fails, I use the official contact address presented by Domains by Proxy to the "Who Is" directories of domain registration web sites:

Consultants closely monitoring the stalking of 'Wyatt Ehrenfels' feel strongly that many of the news readers (e.g. allthesupport.com) cropping up in recent months are created by Usenet stalkers with the intent of using the search engines as a defamation superhighway. Previously, the messages were only accessible through a search of the target's name in Google Groups (i.e. Google's interface with Usenet). But assuming you are a moral person free of mental illness, you won't spend very much time in Google Groups. Fond of pointing out that Usenet's network of news groups is "not the Internet," the stalkers are the first to realize the necessity of making the libelous messages in Usenet prominently available to the broader Internet community. Now these messages are accessible through a search of the target's name in Google Web, not to mention other web search engines and, failing to accomplish their purpose of creating doubt about the target, they at least clutter the search results in a way surfers find distracting. "A reasonable human being sees the message for what it is. The forehead wrinkles after an initial scan of the link to the message, and they move on to the next listing without giving it another thought. But while they may not believe the bad, just a handful of prominently placed junk like this can make it more difficult for them to find the good.

All Aliases Not Created Equal

Perhaps this is an opportune moment to distinguish between two levels of anonymity, because those individuals stalking me have unctiously assailed my hypocrisy on the matter of my nom de plume. But even as I write under a pen name, I am readily accessible to authorities in the event I cross the line into criminal activity. When I send an e-mail or post to a forum, I do not forge header information. The IP address from which I am posting is accessible and traceable. I can be contacted by e-mail, as can the company that hosts my web site. The company that hosts my web site (West Host) is not only well-respected for its zero tolerance of criminal activity, but it does not require the intervention of attorneys before it warns its clients against such Internet abuses as spamming (even before spamming laws prohibited the widespread distribution of unsolicited e-mail). Additionally, West Host does not hide from an opportunity to mediate a dispute between a client and an individual with a complaint about a client's web site.

By contrast, the individuals' whose privacy and freedom to harm is protected by the likes of Usenet, Domains by Proxy, Google, and Chat about Health, forge their headers so that it is impossible to identify them by name or location without the aid of CTU. The challenge posed by a single stalker can be so daunting that it has law enforcement officials in most counties willing to overlook serial misdemeanors. Now imagine the same challenge multiplied by a factor of 12 in cases involving a collaboration among a dozen stalkers operating like gangbanging cyberpunks.

Not all cyberstalking is perpetrated by nose-picking hackers in their teen years. The opportunity to do harm under the cloak of anonymity offered by the Axis of Evil tempts members of academic and professional communities, and I could implicate about a dozen of the psychologists cybersquatting in sci.psychology.psychotherapy. Usenet's structure and search capabilities makes it easy for the SPP stalkers to ally themselves with stalkers from other support groups, where pharmaceutical-shilling marketers engage in the routine harassment and intimidation of outspoken citizens who discourage pharmacology in the management of a specific disorder.

Now to those of you thinking of contacting the administrators of "Chat about College" or "Chat about Health" with requests to delete its web records of defamatory or malicious Usenet posts, I say "good luck." While a couple news readers have distinguished themselves as a cut above others by heeding the call to moderate defamatory posts (PA Health Systems suspended archiving posts to sci.psychology.psychotherapy and the Talk about Network, which will not archive posts to sci.psychology.psychotherapy, deleted cross-posts to other support forums that did not meet its high quality standards), other news readers remain indefatigably unresponsive or unreachable.

Just about everyone agrees it takes an attorney, but what most people don't know is that it takes an attorney and a technically savvy private investigator with a techno nerd side kick to legally serve these administrators. Public access Usenet news servers all have very high traffic rankings, which factor prominently in the search ranking formula of both Yahoo and Google, meaning that a defamatory message cross-posted to a half dozen news groups produces a half dozen posts that rank within the top 10-20 results of a search on your name in Google. The stalkers who've hijacked sci.psychology.psychotherapy know that by strategically adding a handful of news groups in the subject line of their post, they are not only cross-posting slanderous material throughout Usenet, they are also thronging search engines with duplicate records of counterfeit drudge that is, at best, 'bush,' by conventional standards. In addition to Chat about Health and Chat about College, just a few of the other public access Usenet news servers include 1001newsgroups.com, newsreader.org, and usenet-access.com.

Solution: Isolate or Expose

In prior drafts of this report, I likened the stalkers to prisoners and made the following statement:

"So the next time someone suggests that perhaps we need to kick these fellas out of Usenet (and into a life of robbing convenience marts), be gently reminded that the most constructive solution may just be to keep these aspiring outlaws in their own prison. In a twisted display of self-sabotage, isn't that exactly what these stalkers, defending their freedom to stalk, have made of cyberspace's Wild West? Of the world's most unchaperoned party? A prison? Do they not betray their own awareness of this fact when they find creative ways of preventing me, who does not post to Usenet, from being able to safely turn my back on SPP once and for all (without my having to first conduct a weekly threat assessment)? Consider this. While the SPP stalkers attempt to raise money to file a lawsuit against one "kook" for posting to Usenet, they complain about how another "kook" (this would be me) hides "behind my walls," and with a defiant form of wishful thinking, they insist that once my book runs its course I will return to Usenet to engage them on a daily basis. I'm not holding my breath. Are you?

But by no means am I rationalizing the stasis, because the current state of affairs is reflected by a curious mix of the very anonymous and the very public that favors net-stalkers and presents the "worst of both worlds" for their victims. Usenet either needs to be 100 percent public, where we cleave the techno-nerd of his or her anonymizing advantages, or Usenet should be 100 percent cut off from the mainstream Internet." The current state of affairs, which is entirely satisfactory to Google, allows a class of hacker-types to alter their identity while exploiting those who do not by invading their privacy and publicly airing libelous commentary.

But in the weeks following this statement I noticed a torrent of libelous and threatening posts cropping up in Google searches tantamount to a prison break. I even received a phone call from an old friend concerned about my safety. Whatever I must endure in the way of risk to my safety and damage to my physical integrity, I am easily consoled by the fact SPP poses no threat to the credibility of my point of view. Psychology has a lot of critics and the vast, vast majority of these individuals not only manage quite well on their own to avoid the "news groups," but from my straw poll seem to have done so by virtue of the fact they have never heard of them. And I'd like to keep it that way. The posts made public in Google read like someone randomly inserted your name into a malevolent, haiku spin off of Mad Libs product line. In my opinion, SPP should remain isolated from the world. It would be impossible to make it 100 percent public and accountable, so why not make it 100 percent "for-knuckle-draggers-only" private? In all fairness to the original settlers of Usenet, the user network was here well before the Internet, which gave them (among them many belligerents) time to make this or that "news group" a home, build a family, and deem any outsider washing in on the wave of the Internet, a "trespasser." It is best to think of Usenet as a system of caves in Croatia or Afghanistan. Usenet should have never been mainstreamed. Now I don't condone the spoiling of American prisoners with games and televisions, but it would seem that if we were going to devise a system of communication for the residents of C block, what we have now in the way of sci.psychology.psychotherapy would be quite suitable in the way of an application. Take it from an author who manages to sell books on the "outside." Nothing any of the SPP stalkers have to say would hold any weight with a person of sound mind, most notably the whole fear-and-loathing thing they have for people who express a point of view with which they disagree. Seriously, as tersely put by Fox News Business Analyst Neil Cavuto, "You should let people know where you stand, but don't come off like you can't stand people." All the guffawing, flouting, scoffing, taunting, and detracting. All that fulsome sneering veils the umbrage about as well as a mesh bikini, begging the question: just what offended them in the first place? After all these months, I still don't know. Allegations of lying here. Drive-by references to grandiosity there. Something about "befriending Jesness." (Research confirmed that 'Brad Jesness' has composed a similar report of cyberstalking in this news group for his web site). You don't have to land a leading role in Shakespeare's "Much Ado about Nothing" to appreciate the amusing display of sound and fury. In a letter I received recently from someone who popped into SPP, the person wrote, "Have you asked them what their problem is?" to which I soundly replied, "Hell, yeah! They won't tell me." I imagine if you forced them to go on the record, they would squirm and contort to put their displeasure into words, because little of it has anything to do with me. Quite frankly, I doubt many of them even know why they feel the way they do. The feelings are socially transmitted or constructed, sustained by their love of a good fight. The protocol of having an individual actually explain any piece of this mob mish-mosh remains dubiously similar to those of my first observation of misguided, hateful smears, during a recess period in sixth grade. I recall that when Jamie "scumbag" Hathaway moved out of town, the class as a whole needed to elect a new "scumbag." Oh sure, no one really stood out as a leading candidate. And no one really knew how to define a "scumbag." Hell, not even Jamie himself emitted much of an odor. But there was something just "not right" about him. Glasses with rims just a little too thick for a face as staid and pale as his. His jeans may have sagged one inch too far over the top of his shoes. And there's your "scumbag!" But I am speculating of course, and I can't even be sure of my memory for the details of Jamie Hathaway. My memory might even be retrofitting scumbag-like imagery to a boy nicknamed "scumbag." But one thing I am sure of. Faulty memory and all, I am quite sure I remember thinking my classmates were ruining this guy for life. And there's something strangely familiar about the mindless social carnage that surrounds the assignment of the juvenile label, "kook."

But fascinating nonetheless. SPP is a living laboratory of sociological conditions that cannot be replicated outside Abu Ghraib. If you're interested in small group dynamics, reified cultures, deindividuation, and groupthink, SPP is the "fish bowl" (as one of the stalkers herself put it) you want to be watching. Actually, it's more like fish someone forgot to feed. After a few days some fish survive by feeding off those that have overturned and floated to the surface. But on one level I understand those of you who question my interest in this behavior with your disdainful "who cares what they think?" On one level, you are correct. I don't care. I can't care. They [stalkers] make it impossible and otherwise unproductive to care. They set up a state of affairs from which no meaning and no relationships can be made. And likewise, in all fairness to them, they should not care what you or I think if they are quite contented with their own complete set of views. But the strange thing is, they do care. They seem to care a lot. Their veil of self-contentment is so opaque, so heavy, as to betray what they're hiding. I mean, if you don't like what someone has to say, you can have many options other than self-torture and torture of those you unctuosly claim are endowed with the same rights of free speech. You can ignore. You can refute. But going off like a well-made wind-up doll on a yearlong (and counting) campaign of coordinated defamation, harassment, and intimidation ... this is the trademark of antisocial personality disorder. Unfortunately, some SPP folk also show trademark signs of stalking, and that does concern me. A stalker by definition cannot be reasoned with, cannot be refuted or conciliated, or ignored. While their stalking has all the earmarks of being "just a game" for some of these stalkers with no personal stake in the reputation of Psychology, somewhere along the line they became so personally invested and identified with the destruction of others, that failing to produce consequences sufficiently destructive instills a distress as nagging and intolerable as that caused by dropping out of college or having one's credit card stolen. They interpret their failure to destroy their victim as a personal affront by the victim himself.

Oh sure, occasionally a stalker will try to douse the fire beneath their own feet by noting their victims have the right to spew ludicrous "kookery so it can get its ass kicked by the really cool ideas," a non-sensical non sequitur trumped only by their failure to provide any ideas of their own, to discuss any prevailing ideas (or anything relevant to psychotherapy), or to explain what it is that makes the words of the people they hate so deceptive, so hurtful, or so "kooky."

So I would continue to suggest, as I have all along, withdrawing from SPP for greener pastures, which is an odd remark I know consider nothing grows in the red earth of SPP. No, my friend, this planet named after the Roman God of War, this Mars, cannot be terra formed. But if you, a fellow victim, are for some reason too invested in planting your own flag in this uninhabitable planet and in defending your flag from desecration or theft (in what amounts to an extreme "capture the flag"), I'd have just as much reason for doubting your mental compass as I do theirs. Granted, you are entitled to fight for your freedom to express yourself in a forum that is public domain. But let me suggest to you that there are many public domain forums and that Usenet, despite the deceptively tasteful guise of "Google Groups," is not one of them. Usenet existed well before the Internet, and should remain isolated. By cherry-picking those they are willing to tolerate (and setting everyone else up for stalking), those squatting in SPP have proven they are bent on destroying a climate hospitable to all on-topic messages. So try not to confuse the residents of SPP for a representative sample of the public. We're talking about a group of distressed, impaired, or very bored sensation seekers who have defined what is "normal" for their community. And everything that is not we all know to be "kooky." If you find yourself stuck in this asylum, I suggest you pull a chair into the corner and play solitaire. If I felt at all required by the lies to spar with them every day (as they wish) and set the record straight, I would have felt like I had checked myself into a local psychiatric facility and could not get back out.

As will become clearer the further you delve into this report, it is easier to fit an elephant through the eye of a needle than to maintain respect for individuals who feel the need to loiter SPP let alone litter it with dialogue laced with designer steroids to maintain hostilities and manufacture false perception. These individuals are just the types to mistake a remitting panic attack for a lack of pulse, and so with this unctuous truth-squading, they rapid-fire recriminations like armed crack junkies, just to remind themselves that they're alive! I am told the 'cutting,' which is all the rage now on college campuses (where one makes a habit of slicing one's arm to "feel something"), offers a similarly sensational and reassuring proof of life. No doubt you too will want to grab some of these 'persons' by the shoulders, burn your solemn gaze straight into their eye, and urge them to find a pool hall, a local Starbucks, or a Playstation 2. As a high school student I had more respect for the dead heads who used to smoke a midnight bone or two outside the 7-11 then some of these 'persons' who assume there will come a time that I will be unable to find anything better to do than to trade disparaging lies on a message board. And yet some 'persons' call this a career, or at least they imply as much when they announce every so often that they are 'retiring from Usenet.' I'd be very interested to learn just what they think they're contributing to the gross national product, though not interested enough to put the question to anyone in SPP. Honestly, if we're going to convene task forces and committees to consider adding to the DSM diagnostic scheme such topical disorders as "Road Rage" -- no doubt to provide a simple and single diagnosis for patients who would otherwise be labeled with about a half dozen other major disorders -- then we might as well create a similar bypass for those who frequent certain unmoderated groups on Usenet. And let's face facts. What we're dealing with here is the Internet equivalent of road rage. Some 'gent' doesn't like the way I drive and so he pursues me in a vehicle and on a road which are all extensions of an ego which grew to twice its normal size in soreness. And with a little help from some backseat drivers, he transformed this "news group" into something they hope comes across as a combination of Variety and The Smoking Gun but which on its best day does a fairly decent imitation of London's Daily Mirror. A tabloid masquerading as a news outlet...a mockery of the "news" moniker the likes of which has not been seen since Weekly World News (thanks to which I now know that Elvis's extraterrestrial twin weighed a thousand pounds when experts in the field of forensic herpetology cut him out of the belly of a possessed crocodile).

Diagnosing the Problem

But then I suppose no committee deserves to be saddled with the task of identifying the appropriate class for a new diagnoses (Usenet Road Rage) that would appear to be the abomination of a mad experiment cross-fertilizing prototypical carriers of all Axis I & II disorders. Now unlike the x and y axes, in the DSM classification scheme there is no plotting in two dimensional space of comorbid Schizoaffective Disorder, for example, and one of the personality disorders. Such a diagnostic system would have a cross-breeding feel to it as strange as it is suited to that Island of Dr. Moreau we call sci.psychology.psychotherapy, which many regular folk cannot visit without feeling distinctly shipwrecked. Having aced a graduate course in Adult Psychopathology, I can tell you that I am not talking out of the side of my mouth here. I mean, would Usenet Road Rage be a Mood Disorder? I am thinking here of SPPs signature combination of psychomotor agitation and mental retardation, not to mention the manic flight of ideas and pressured utterances with a vague resemblance to speech. But then with speech that fractured and profane ("j00 thinks me evuhl, eh fucktard") I am required to consider the Tic Disorders and maybe even Tourette's. (But if involuntary motor production were criterial, I'd also be forced to consider putting this new diagnosis in the same category as childhood bedwetting). But when I remind myself that this is not so much a failure of the motor circuits as of parts of the brain involved in the making of meaning, it occurs to me that a broader use of the term fracturing effectively captures their disintegration of personality into multiple identities, and I think -- hmm -- Dissociative Disorder. Perhaps most prominent is the rolling into an Internet persona of all those needs and traits they can't possibly take with them when they leave the house (some of them may not leave the house very often). But alas, if I settled on any one of the above mentioned classifications for the proposed disorder, I'd still be neglecting many other suitable candidates, such as Substance-Induced Disorder. Not only are some SPP stalwarts card carrying members of the drug culture, but also their habit of loitering SPP in defiance of "other things to do in life" bares the earmark of addiction, spurring speculating as to whether the professionals in question were ever 'about the music, man.' While the SPP clique converges on a carousing proclamation of how my expatriation from Psychology is well-deserved, I often wonder how some of these individuals