False Reports of Abuse Disrupt Victims’ Use of Internet

Even flame wars have their versions of non-conventional weapons. One such weapon is the false complaint. One way to prevail in a flame war is to take away your adversary’s means of communicating via Usenet or the Web. If you don’t like someone’s Web site, report to the company that registered or hosts the domain that the owner of the Web site is involved in activities that violate ICANN rules, the company TOS, or the law. Cyberstalkers in un-moderated Usenet news groups have discovered that many companies measure the validity of an accusation by the number of complaints These same cyberstalkers also learned over the years that many companies are willing to terminate a client’s services “just to get some peace” (to quote one opportunistic cyberstalker).

In this soap operatic struggle between kook hunters and victims in Usenet, it is not uncommon to find these combatants spending their days using the complaint process to cancel the public posting accounts through which the other side participates anonymously in the news groups. In what amounts to an arms race, each side searches the Web to register for as many of these free services as are needed to restore confidence in one’s capacity to participate anonymously whenever one desires. The process of canceling, restoring, and registering (new) accounts is as regular as the ebb and flow of the tides (with an occasional riptide or tsunami). Usenet is polluted by bellicose claims that an adversary’s account was canceled or that the service itself was suspended by an upstream provider. It’s like a “hit” of a euphoric, self-esteem inflating hallucinogen.

The false complaint is an effective armament in the hands of organized cyberstalking gangs. A gang of just six individuals can produce at least six complaints. If you add complaints e-mailed by the same six individuals under aliases (and from different computers), six can easily become 16. If these six gangbangers maintain cooperative networks with other Usenet-based gangs, 16 can become 60. The un-moderated Usenet news group alt.usenet.kooks, a vibrant forum that received over 145,000 messages since its inception in 1993, is a central nerve center for the identification of “net kooks” and the recruitment of “kook hunters,” “net cops,” and “kook-ologists” for the purposes of defaming and disrupting “kooks” certified through its process of soliciting nominations and votes across news groups Usenet-wide. You may be voted a net kook on any number of grounds.

• Your views may threaten the interests (i.e. reputation or profit) of some entity (i.e. corporation, academic community) of which some other Usenet participants are members. Such trail blazers or iconoclasts, who proceed to disseminate a view or link to a Web site without first establishing a professional reputation, Web-searchable record of credentials, peer recognition, or media support, is accused of arrogance, paranoia, or narcissism (even if the alleged kook has a doctorate in the field about which he is opining). EXAMPLE: Social psychologist Wyatt Ehrenfels has been nominated as a kook by a graduate student in Psychology for his criticism of various policies and procedures driving knowledge production, teaching, and career education among psychology professors.
  
• You may make pretenses to first-hand knowledge or scientific certainty of an improbable phenomenon (e.g. alien abduction, government conspiracy). This is the most “slam dunk” of all allegations. EXAMPLE: Diana Napolis, operating under the alias of Curio Jones, identified providers of many day care services as fronts for the ritual satanic abuse of children. She also accused director Stephen Speilberg and actress Jennifer Love Hewitt of manipulating her psychotronically.
  
• Certain kook hunters may hold in contempt your promotional zeal, strident rhetoric, or perceived “attention seeking.” EXAMPLE: M.A. psychologist Brad Jesness (and critic of psychotherapy’s lack of scientific foundation) voiced his criticisms on a regular basis to sci.psychology.psychotherapy news group, criticisms often laced with valuative terms and other emotionally charged words like “quack.”
  

• Kook hunters also like to mock individuals who seem emotionally bothered by their personal plight, or disgruntled. Personal loss is the motivation behind participation in Usenet and, by extension, personal gain is perceived / portrayed as the sole motivation for participation in Usenet / Internet.
  

• Certain participants may have rational and credible views that do not threaten the interests of any kook hunter, and may not promote the views aggressively, but a kook award may be used to mock the participant’s inability to express his or her views in intelligible or coherent English.
  

Once someone in your “home news group” refers you to alt.usenet.kooks for “kooking out” … and once you are dis-honored with any one of the dozens of kook awards awarded on a monthly basis … the 30-35 stalwart members of this news group leverage conventional practices (i.e. known as loser attitude readjustment tools) against you. This means you can expect dozens of self-proclaimed kook hunters, net cops, and cyber-divas to e-mail false reports of abuse to your ISP, Web host, and public posting service to deny you access to your e-mail, Web site, and Usenet.

In actuality of course, there is no abuse. Participating in Usenet is not a crime. Most alleged kooks do not participate with any greater frequency than any one of the individuals cyberstalking them. Furthermore, while the alleged kook is attempting to engage in on-topic discussion, it is the kook hunter whose entire record of participation in Usenet (accounting for thousands of messages to “news groups”) amounts to nothing more than off-topic, libelous, and vulgar flames. If these same foul-mouthed cyberstalkers are permitted under the law to treat unmoderated Usenet news groups like public urinals, then certainly any individual, even if we assume for the sake of argument that such a person is incoherent, unconventional, disgruntled, or self-promotional, has the same freedom under the law to express his or her views. Everyone would agree to that, especially when we consider that these are the only individuals whose contributions are keeping the news group appropriately topical.

Most socially engineered complaints of abuse meet with initial success, as service providers assume validity and integrity in numbers, but just about all of the actions taken against the victims are reversed on appeal. Unlike false police reports, false reports of abuse to providers of Web-related services are regarded as frivolous horseplay and the cyberstalkers are not held accountable for their actions. Without any risk or down side, the cyberstalkers will continue to pursue the payoff of their semi-automated, mass-mobilizing kook alert system: temporary suspension of their victim’s services and an enduring public record -- in the form of an announcement -- of the punishment for the victim’s spuriously alleged “abuse.”

Manufacturing Evidence to Support False Reports of Abuse

Knowing that some client-centered service providers (i.e. which exclude the free mail or hosting services) are savvy to false reports, the really determined cyberstalkers attempt to backs up their allegations with manufactured evidence. Just yesterday I was alerted by a victim to one such attempt: "Apparently someone is spamming people using some kind of bradjesness.us email address. I do not even have email service through that domain. But, apparently, it was a good thing I both wrote register.com (where I have the bradjesness.us domain) and called them BECAUSE apparently there has been serious email spam looking like it has come from my domain. The incident note I got from them indicated that any further complaints would result in a loss of service. I emailed them and called them and made it clear that all such complaints were completely bogus. Thought you would be interested in hearing about the hypocritical CABAL activity.” (i.e. the “CABAL” is the moniker of the gang stalking a number of individuals, including Mr. Brad Jesness). "I wonder what would happen if I put a note about my bradjesness.us in my sig file, used with every newsgroup post I made. This is what "Morely Dotes" does with spamblocked.com AND WITH http://www.wilhelp.com/bj_faq -- thus spam-advertising both about 13,000 times. My guess is that if I put bradjesness.us in the signature at the bottom of my posts, before I had made 50 posts, I would lose bradjesness.us because of a large volume of complaints!!! Something needs to balance this nonsense.”

In some cases, it becomes necessary to manufacture evidence just to get someone you do not like nominated for a kook award. I’m talking about instances in which individuals dabbled briefly in Usenet before leaving altogether after discovering the inherent risks of these “news group”-posing flame communities. You’d think such a departure would placate or disarm the kook hunters, but if such an individual still manages an unpopular Web site, the cyberstalkers may be reluctant to let him or her go., especially if other individuals occasionally praise the virtues of the Web site as a method of baiting flames.

Take me for example. When someone like myself does not participate in the flame war, the SPP stalkers find it difficult to sustain their attacks and have to manufacture their own fuel for the anti-Ehrenfels juggernaut by responding to me as if I had posted. I was alerted to this tactic by an anonymous e-mail which called my attention to a post titled "[NAME OF STALKER OMITTED] exposed: Ehrenfels uncovers the ring leader and CABAL masterplan." Not only did I not expose any individuals or make any such claims, neither did anyone else on my behalf. In a somewhat more direct method of fabrication, an SPP stalker, having wearied of my nonresponsiveness to weeks of menacing posts, titled his February 21 post "Subject: Response from JWEhrenfels" in which I am purported to have posted the following response to Usenet "What wisdom you wield. You are absolutely right. If I held my breath, I would have only 3-4 minutes to convince the world. However, that being said, I have a genetic predisposition myself, to tilt at windmills." This was copied from the response page of my web site and used to make it appear as though I replied to this fellow and, more importantly, as if I had replied to this fellow in Usenet (knowing full well that I would lose credibility for appearing to engage such a person in a dialogue). In the most direct method of fabrication yet, SPP stalkers have forged the e-mail address of their victims in mass e-mailings designed to depict one of their targets as a SPAMMER in an effort to blacklist his web site with anti-SPAM organizations and ISPs.

More recently, one stalker posts excerpts from this -- my -- report once every 2-3 days, depicting these passages as a new day's rant and reporting that she feels frightened by my pathological obsessiveness (har har). (What’s more obsessive? Finishing a report to safeguard once and for all one’s reputation from Usenet-disseminated libel available to search engines? Or scanning that Web site multiple times each day in search of fodder to flame an individual who does not want your conversation or attention and who has not participated in Usenet in over a year? E-gads!).

One well-mannered and 'in-many-ways-mighty' individual, with a bold stroke of independent thinking in Usenet this week, questioned the tedious -- dare I say 'obsessive' -- attempts by SPP stalkers to hawk over-extended characterizations of the life of this 'guy' (me) who doesn't post in Usenet. "What's the point of this?" he asked, insouciantly parrying her inelegantly labored effigies with alternative explanations. For his efforts, he received peevishly terminal counter-assertions. If there's one thing this stalker is not, it's over-nuanced, smothering an acute sensitivity to those vexing possibilities with wooden rumpus ranging from "Your analogy is not relevant here" to "You don't know what we're talking about." And, for good measure, he was thrice labeled a "troll" in one parting gesture. This from a stalker whose efforts to portray herself as objective and centrist consist of authoritative expressions of approval for my reports about graduate school she has apparently set aside and filed under 'least damaging to the field of Psychology.'

Confederates in Stalking Feign Altruism, Sympathy for Fictitious Complaint against Stalker

The stalkers in SPP are full of contradictions. Occasionally, they can talk trash and use words like "immunity" and "invulnerability" to intimidate their victims. But when bulk e-mailing false reports of abuse to a victim's service provider, showing more fanfare than the "letters to Santa" ending of Miracle on 34th Street, they'll play the victim and even pretend to speak for a public the kook's views have put at risk. Athletics and theater similarly meet in when the athlete puts on an act to persuade a referee to penalize his opponent ... the power forward who throws himself to the floor to draw a charge or a punter who falls on his ass to draw a roughing the kicker penalty. Similarly, the principal belligerents of SPP often behave like agents provocateurs, feigning sympathy for one another in an effort to mobilize sentiment and instigate hostilities against a target. The maudlin display, which conveys a "hey, see, farcical strategem," is one way the stalker can preserve his antisocial dignity for the benefit of his peers. All these ego gymnastics do not escape the attention of the beleaguered "kook," who inquires into how any one of these belligerents could have been moved to "threatening" behavior by what amounts to a benign opinion, invoking the age-old maxim that people threaten when threatened. With a defiant "you can't affect me" swagger, the stalker scales back his hostility just long enough to issue the non sequitur in which he claims he's "jus' havin' fun."

The method of feigning sympathy is often necessary when a stalker needs to pre-empt criticism for appearing pugnacious, obsessive, or self-indulgent. But none of us should underestimate the feat that is the network of relationships among antisocial personalities (an accomplishment facilitated by the anonymity and geographic distance that gently reassures the stalker that no one ever really gets that close). So it is not surprising to find an occasional 'hiccup' in the 'emotional' support strategy, at which time a stalker might adopt a second alias as a means of feigning sympathy for oneself.

The alias(es) also fulfill other vital functions. The SPP stalker may wish to manage risks and minimize culpability, as when the tastefully named "[NAME OMITTED]," a psychotherapist who had been using his real name for years, began posting ghoulish vows-of-harm. Naturally, as "unthreatened" and "unaffected" as he is by the "kook's rants," he volunteers the motive for his threats, claiming the proliferation of the "kooky" complaints are causing distress to [less sophisticated?; less hardy?] others. Yes, to others. Three or four words into their vulgar posts, and I'm already dumbfounded that he should ask me to view him as Albert Schweitzer or Clara Barton. He dignifies his attacks by portraying the "kooks" as "stalkers masquerading as victims," and ties his justification to sympathy with an SPP ally, the graduate student specializing in cognitive psychology, who reported that an anonymous letter of complaint, alleging his unethical conduct on Usenet, had been mailed to supervisors and ranking members of his psychology department. The disclosure of the letter, which is likely fictitious, is intended to foment hostilities and provide fellow stalkers with a motive and justification to respond in kind by moving more of their stalking into the real lives of their adversaries.

The public disclosure of the letter, the incursion into real life, was predictably greeted by a torrent of stilted lamentations and retaliatory overtures by his cohorts, all of which struck me as a badly rehearsed play. I was filled with images from Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October. Like the Russian captain who averted certain death by running his submarine into an oncoming missile before it could arm itself, our graduate student pre-empts real complaints to his supervisors by reporting that such a letter had already been written. After the threats that followed the letter's discloure, any one of the "kooks", desperate enough to contemplate relief through such official channels, is more than happy to assume, albeit incorrectly, that someone else's initiative had spared him the work and risk of writing the letter.