#OpISIS 6
We left off at the end of Spring 2012, after covering the brief but eventful time period between January 2012 — May 2012. As a summary, I’m going to add a timeline of events below that occurred during these five months because honestly, it makes my life easier. You can find a more detailed timeline here with #OpISIS 6 events in red. Keep in mind that Sabu was approached and flipped by the FBI in early June 2011, approximately six months before the following started taking place:
January 11, 2012:
- Sabu and Anonymous issue a warning to Israel after an Iranian scientist is assassinated; while the FBI is monitoring Sabu’s computer 24/7, the hacker calls on Anonymous to attack Israel’s infrastructure
- See #OpISIS Part 4
January 12, 2012:
- Sabu starts a campaign called “#FuckIsrael”
- Saudi hacker 0xOmar posts sentiments similar to Sabu’s, encouraging hackers across the globe to unite against Israel
- The term “Mauritania Hacker Team” is mentioned on Twitter after being mentioned only one time prior and a month after Sabu became an informant
- (see #OpISIS Part 4)
January 28, 2012
- The account @op_israel is created
February 9, 2012
- TheAnonPress88 releases a video about Israel; it’s the first time the #opisrael hashtag is used in conjunction with an Anonymous video (that I’m aware of)
- (see #OpISIS Part 4)
February 11, 2012
- The first anonghost account is created (@anongh0st)
- (see #OpISIS Part 3)
February 16, 2012
- Jamie Chanaga, a volunteer for Infragard and tied to AnonScandinavia’s far-right, online trolly friend, SheliJ, registers Umbra Systems LLC; the company later obtains the trademark for Exeintel, which becomes embroiled in controversy involving at least one FBI agent after the January 6th insurrection
- Buzzfeed reports that Chanaga infiltrated the #OpISIS scene by at least 2015
- (See #OpISIS Part 2)
End of February 2012
- The unknown hacking group, Mauritania Hacker Team, makes a name for itself by allegedly hacking 15,000 Israeli email accounts and the Bank of Israel
- (See #OpISIS Part 4)
March 4, 2012
- The name “Mauritania Attacker” is advertised for the first time on Twitter because of an interview he landed with the Digital Intifada Blogspot site; Mauritania Attacker claims to be the founder of Mauritania Hacker Team, Teamr00t, and Anonghost
March 6, 2012
- Sabu and others including Jeremy Hammond are arrested; Barrett Brown’s home is searched
March 20, 2012
- Hacker Higino Ochoa is arrested; self-professed hacker, Ray Johansen, bizarrely claims that Ochoa floated him $20 million to rescue 17 kidnapped people in Iran — despite the fact that it appears Ochoa was either in prison or still under supervised release when this happened
- (See #OpISIS Part 5)
April 12, 2012
- Judain Hussain a.k.a. Trick from Team Poison is arrested in the U.K.; Mauritania Attacker claims that they used to be part of Hussain’s hacking team
- (See #OpISIS Part 3)
May 27, 2012
- Ray Johansen’s close associate “Aaron Kesel” (a.k.a. @An0nAkn0wledge @An0nKn0wledge) publicly announces that he’s been compromised; he claims that he was raided, arrested, tortured, and interrogated by the FBI; Reddit users, Ochoa’s wife, and virtually everyone else on the planet with more than half a brain cell question the validity of his story
- (See #OpISIS Part 5)
June 2012
- Paul Lukoskie, Accenture’s current deputy director for product strategy and business development, listed on his linkedin profile that he was involved in ad-hock products from the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (U.S. Homeland Security) in 2012
- He stated that these products were directed towards Anonymous operations such as #OpUSA, #OpIsrael, and #OpPetrol, all three of which Mauritania Attacker’s Anonghost initiated and/or was heavily involved in
- (See #OpISIS Part 4)
What we saw for almost the first half of 2012, was an FBI informant (Sabu) rallying Anonymous troops against Israel two months before he was pulled out of the field.
During that same time period, multiple individuals tied to or working for U.S. intelligence/private intelligence firms showed up, including Jaime Chanaga, Paul Lukoskie and Jonathan Nichols, a “DoD Secret Cleared Communications and Intelligence Strategist,” who admitted that they were “leveraging vulnerabilities” in hackers’ “human interactions,” recruiting “high profile hackers into HUMINT networks at major conferences,” and developing “HUMINT networks within hacker culture.”
In 2010 alone, Nichols was working for the Lincoln Group as a “propaganda analyst” and with “all forms of PSYOP” while identifying “actors in the hacker/hacktivist space which were disrupting intelligence and military operations against jihadist websites.” By 2013, he was leading the industry in “reporting on the nexus between hackers, hacktivists, and state actors, including the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters, the Syrian Electronic Army, Anonymous, AnonGhost.”
This time period in early 2012 also proves that the same disinfo agents involved in “post-HBGary hack, post-Sabu arrest” operations are the same actors we see today who have lied about their background and/or bragged about hacks but have never been arrested. This, despite openly publishing personal information about themselves including their name, where they live, and photos of their family members (including children).
Some of these actors have also publicly stated that they’ve worked with U.S. intelligence (with, not for), they’ve been compromised, and the CIA pressured them for previous crimes they committed. None of this has dissuaded members of Anonymous from working with them which only seems to further legitimize the rumors that Anonymous is compromised, and has been for a long time.
They’ve also infiltrated and destroyed activist groups (or tried to), they’ve run disinfo and defamation campaigns mainly against fellow activists and journalists, and some of them have spy copped female activists. They’re well documented liars that have sent death threats to both activists and journalists, including once to allegedly kill a story they didn’t want published. In addition, they’ve abused, threatened, and/or blackmailed multiple activists and journalists over the years.
Despite how brazen the abuse and disinformation operations have been for the last decade, the large majority of the hacktivist, transparency, WikiLeaks support, and whistleblower community will not speak out against them. It’s a sobering fact that, again, contributes to the belief that these communities have long been abusive, corrupted, and infiltrated by feds and bad actors.
In this article, we’ll be covering the time period between June 2012 — November 2012 (approximately). I’m going to report further on Mauritania Attacker and his hacking group, Teamr00t, as well as the use of the hashtag #OpIsrael, the Twitter account @Op_Israel, the “#OpIsrael Reloaded” operation, and the Steubenville rape case.
Mauritania Attacker
New hacking groups also arrived on the scene shortly after Sabu was approached by the FBI in June 2011. For instance, the Mauritania Hacker Team conveniently showed up mere weeks after Sabu was initially arrested. Prior to that, no one had ever heard of them and yet somehow this group became one of the leads during an operation that was essentially started by Sabu while he was an informant (#OpIsrael).
As a reminder, Mauritania Attacker claimed that “he” founded the Mauritania Hacker Team, which made a big splash in late February — early March 2012, with impressive claims like they hacked the Bank of Israel, among other things.
Mauritania Attacker is also the same hacker who told meethackers.in that he onboarded to his team both U.S. and U.K. intelligence agents in order to keep an eye on them because this makes perfect sense said no one ever. In another interview conducted by Digital Intifada on March 4, 2012, that I mistakenly reported previously as being unavailable, Digital Intifada couldn’t praise the virtually unknown group enough (the poor English skills below, or the illusion they created to make you believe they only speak broken English, is theirs, not mine):
Mauritania HaCker Team is known as one of the best hacker of the world after many destruction of websites of Israel , Usa , Danemark and many Government countries and most dangerous thing it was the creation of viruses wich harmed many computers over the world the team is just one person called “Mauritania Attacker” with the following address mauritania@hacker.ps The Team has developped a worm called ‘Client Facebook’ you can watch the method in youtube cause facebook deleted the video many time! you can also visit the page of Mauritania HaCker Team on Facebook.
The Mauritania Hacker Crew have been in effect since 2003 and have hit the headlines on most of the defacement reporting sites and blogs , and recently have had their pages censored from fb .The leak which was announced via the facebook for the team contains a partial amount(2000+) of email accounts and clear text passwords from this claimed 15,000 accounts with threats that more is to come soon. see video below.
Mauritania Hacker Team has been around since 2003, eh? Is that why no one heard of them until late February 2012? Three things stood out to me in this short interview. First, the interviewee brought up 0xOmar’s message that hackers should unite against Israel. I mentioned this in Part 4 because 0xOmar’s message appeared one day after Sabu started pushing an operation against Israel.
Second, Mauritania Attacker blatantly tried to distance himself from Sabu’s fed-infested #AntiSec in what I believe was an attempt to make themselves appear more trustworthy because in case you missed it, this interview conveniently took place two days before Sabu was pulled from the field and outed in the media as an FBI informant.
Digital Intifada 2: What is your opinion on the other hackers out there anon antisec etc
Mauritania Attacker: Never heard about them !!
Third, he was obviously pushing a pro-Iran agenda for unknown reasons:
Digital Intifada 2: Do you think usa and israel will attack iran
Mauritania Attacker: They can’t Iran became strong !!!
The alleged hacker stated that his targets were Israel, the U.S., Denmark and “all ennemies [sic] of Islam especially bad Countries!” and he ended the interview with:
Mauritania HaCker Team won’t stop hacking ennemies [sic] of Islam we will defend our people everywhere from Mauritania to Afghanistan (All Muslims) !!!!
Mauritania Attacker later claimed that he was a former member of Junaid Hussain’s “Team Poison,” which I’m guessing gave him some very much needed credibility at a time when no one knew who he was.
Summer 2012: Mauritania Hacker’s Teamr00t
After leaving Team Poison, Mauritania Attacker founded three hacking groups: Mauritania Hacker Team, Teamr00t, and Anonghost. Teamr00t showed up in the early summer of 2012, and in their very first tweet they claimed that they hacked the “famous Russia website” otpuskinfo.com, which in no way appears famous on any level.
They spent the rest of the day bragging about other websites they defaced in the name of Palestinian soccer player, Mahmoud Sarsak, who was being held without charge by Israeli authorities at the time. However, some of the websites they hit are questionable at best:
dewaltsawreview.com (doesn’t seem to exist)
stellardistribution.co.za (a winery in South Africa)
reynoldsproperty.co.za (Cape Town, South Africa)
homeworkcheetah.com (so insignificant it’s never been archived and doesn’t seem to exist)
skylightparties.com (Boston, MA)
amvdesignstudio.com (an exercise gym in Rochester, NY)
They also claimed that they hacked an “American war machine” website listed as wholewarriorproject.us. And no, no one has ever heard of this site including Archive.org which didn’t archive it until 2016, and Google, which only returned four search results for it, one of which is from the Digital Intifada blog site because they reported on this ridiculously absurd hack.
I gotta ask, is this what hackers and/or Anonymous do? They spend their time defacing websites owned by innocent people? What’s weird is that some of the websites Teamr00t hit can be found on this pseudo resume at hireitpeople.com, such as MpireSolutions.com and Lucky7evenBoston.com. Even more fun is the fact that Lucky7evenBoston’s Twitter account was created in 2009 and the account stopped tweeting on the very same day Teamr00t claimed they hacked their website.
Not a single tweet posted about being hacked and having their website defaced by a so-called pro-Palestinian hacking group? Huh.
Additionally, MpireSolutions a.k.a. “Affinity Creations,” shared the same phone number as Lucky7evenBoston, a group that claims it can “give you the easiest connection to Boston’s 18+ events / parties.”
And no, I don’t suggest that you click on either of these sites directly (or the ones I’m about to point out) seeing that Google has designated mpiresolutions.com as “malicious,” according to urlscan.io. So let’s dig a bit more into this MpireSolutions, shall we?
According to their website, Sebastian Wolfe is the CEO of MpireSolutions despite the url showing the name “Luciana Batista” and Wolfe’s bio information stating that he’s actually “Chriss Moore.” The phone number listed for Wolfe/Batista/Moore is 507–541–4567 and a quick Google search shows that the area code is Minnesota (despite allegedly being located in Boston) and is tied to a multitude of other fake online personas.
The name Sebastian Wolfe is the same name as the author who published, “The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes,” and a character from the video game “Infamous,” in which a bike messenger is “caught in the center of an explosion that devastates several city blocks of the fictional Empire City.” Empire City. Mpire Solutions.
If you search for “Chriss Moore” or “Luciana Batista,” you can find a myriad of sketchy websites touting his (and sometimes “her”) successes under different names.
One website described Mr. Moore as a former professor at The Hebrew University after serving in the Israeli Army. He graduated from Harvard Business School, was a Baker scholar (whatever that is), sits on the Publications Review Board of the Harvard Business School Press, and we’re suppose to believe all of this despite the webpage using both “him” and “her” to describe Moore. They also randomly use “Orit” as his last name.
Here’s another website that claims “Chriss Moore” is now a woman with a phone number listed 800–123–456–789, which obviously isn’t a legitimate phone number in the U.S., but as you can see, the bio of the female Chriss Moore is the same as the male Chris Moore.
The worst of it is that this online persona claimed that they founded “A Cloud Guru,” an easily debunked assertion seeing that the company was started in Austin, Texas by Sam and Ryan Kroonenburg.
According to mpiresolutions.com, on November 8, 2020, less than two years ago, they listed their phone number and address as such:
251 Heath St #206 Boston, MA 02130
(617) 804–0539
(617) 829–3699
If we google the address, at least one search result shows that “Mpire Ventures LLC” was founded on November 9, 2015, and lists 215 Heath Street #206 as their company address. This was further confirmed by corporate filings on Massachusetts’ government website. So sure, one might argue, “Hey Llama, these are two different companies. The first one looks like a scam, but this one seems legit.” Right.
However, the screenshot of the website on November 8, 2020 not only lists the same website (mpiresolutions.com), the company now using the website, Mpire Ventures LLC, listed the same Twitter account that “Mpire Solutions” was using back in 2012: @mpiresolutions.
So, there you have it. Some of the websites that Mauritania Attacker’s Teamr00t claimed to deface appear to be complete and utter bullshit. And not only does it appear to be bullshit, they encouraged everyone to visit websites deemed “malicious” by Google by boasting about defacing them.
Lastly, if anyone has a reasonable explanation as to how so many mundane and/or fake websites for companies based in Boston (along with the other ones) tie in with Palestinian resistance, I’m all ears. Moving on…
During the last two weeks of June 2012, Teamr00t boasted about hacking big, scary websites like real estate agencies, graphic design firms, and a number of dentists because nothing says legit like hacking the websites of innocent people within a particular medical field that is already rife with higher than average suicide rates.
And I don’t even know if these were legit websites because I only have so much time to research every single thing they claimed to hack.
Then they hacked a WordPress Theme website because no revolution is complete without taking down some blog designs. This level of stupidity continued for months.
On July 8th, they announced that they hacked “all Israel FB [Facebook] accounts” and then they only listed 24 because I guess only 24 Israeli Facebook accounts exist. The day before, someone jumped on Twitter and posted to Teamr00t, “…you guys are freaks…” and, frankly, I couldn’t agree more.
Teamr00t is also a great example as to why you should ALWAYS ask someone to back up their claims or post a list of targeted websites when you’re watching the news or your Twitter feed and you see, “Anonymous hacked ten billion Russian websites!!!!”
On July 28th, Teamr00t started posting screenshots of their hacks and how very exciting!! Let’s take a look:
So what’s W124 MBCI, you ask? Oh, just an online club for fans of Mercedes Benz because Teamr00t really showed Netanyahu with that one. I mean, why directly hack a German auto manufacturer when you can target a random online forum filled with innocent people. When I hear “enemy of the pro-Palestinian resistance,” the first thing I think of is Mercedes Benz fans, don’t you?
On August 11th, Mauritania Attacker’s Teamr00t announced that they hacked the “official website” of the Syrian football team but no, they didn’t do that, either. But it sounds super cool, right? Syria doesn’t have enough problems so let’s claim that we attacked their football team when we actually didn’t.
Five days later they hacked a “food storage” website called survivalfoodstorageinfo.com because in case you wanted to prep for the next nuclear war, Teamr00t has other plans. Then they started a “Fuck USA” campaign that sounded eerily similar to Sabu’s “Fuck Israel” campaign seven months prior.
And in case I failed to mention it, at no point did Teamr00t get any real traction on their tweets until the third week of August 2012, when two tweets went out about them on August 21st, another one was posted on the 22nd, and then on August 24th, @xLuLzNicKx and @2zz0 began heavily promoting them (which still didn’t make any real difference).
#OpIsrael Reloaded
On June 21, 2012, the @Op_Israel account, which was mentioned previously as being created on January 28, 2012 (approximately three weeks after Sabu encouraged hackers around the world to target Israel), became more active not only in tweeting but in using the hashtag #OpIsrael. Remember, the hashtag was virtually non-existent before 2012, and between January 1, 2012 — May 27, 2012, it was only used approximately 40 times, a highly insignificant number when it comes to social media.
Additionally, when the @Op_Israel account appeared to use it for the first time on June 21st, which was the second time the account had ever tweeted, they included Sabu’s hashtag #fuckisrael. Of course, we must allow for the possibility that the account deleted tweets from this time period.
On July 1st, just ten days after @Op_Israel started using the #OpIsrael hashtag, @Cyberwarzonecom announced “OpIsrael Reloaded” by posting a presser video to both their website, cyberwarzone.com, and their Youtube account, “CyberwarzoneVids.”
The video is no longer available but a website run by @OccPal, which the @Op_Israel account later described as a “Twitter legend,” posted the video’s lengthy message. You can find the message on @OccPal’s website or cyberwarzone.com via Archive.org here and here.
In the message, Cyberwarzone.com (or whoever wrote it) stated, “We at Anonymous and TeaMp0isoN would like you to take a few minutes out from your busy lives…” You’ll remember that Team Poison was allegedly connected to Mauritania Attacker, a self-proclaimed former member and the founder of Mauritania Hacker Group, Teamr00t, and Anonghost.
If you scroll down on the archived page of Cyberwarzone.com, you can see that they were also promoting a company called Team Cymru Research NFP during this same time period:
According to Team Cymru’s website, the team’s mission is to “save and improve lives by working with security teams around the world, enabling them to track and disrupt the most advanced bad actors and malevolent infrastructures.”
They’ve also created products like Pure Signal™ Recon which “allows security teams to monitor and investigate external threat actor activity with a level of clarity similar to what they would expect from their internal network telemetry.” This includes tracing “threat actors and cyber criminals through more than a dozen proxies,” and then following them “indefinitely.”
Team Cymru was founded in 2005 by Rabbi Rob Thomas and in recent news they acquired Amplicy, an Israel-based cybersecurity firm.
The company shows up in approximately 30 HBGary emails on WikiLeaks’ website because of course they did. On February 25, 2010, Aaron Barr sent an email to Brian Masterson, the CTO of Northrop Grumman, that included a link to Team Cymru’s “Botnet Analysis and Tactical Tool for Law Enforcement.” This tool was launched on a “free website designed to help law enforcement around the world to identify and coordinate cyber crime investigations.”
At the time, Steve Santorelli, a former Scotland Yard detective, was the director of global outreach for the firm, and some of the firm’s partners listed in 2012 included BAE Systems Applied Intelligence and Pierre Omidyar’s Ebay.
After Sabu was arrested, Reuters reached out to Jerry Dixon, the former head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division and then Director of Analysis at Team Cymru:
“What this case shows is that the FBI is getting very effective in going after these groups. They are able to get members to turn in the others and peel back the onion and ferret out many more of the members.”
So, that’s how “OpIsrael Reloaded” was seemingly first launched: By a website allegedly controlled by someone based in the Netherlands using the name “Reza Rafati,” who promoted U.S. intelligence firms tied to both Israel and HBGary. The released press announcement on cyberwarzone.com also alluded to TeamPoison’s involvement in “OpIsrael Reloaded” but as we’ll see later, the operation may have started on July 1, 2012, but it wasn’t fully adopted by Anonymous and Anonghost until March 2013.
In fact, looking at the timeline, it appears that some Anonymous and/or Anonghost operations were mentioned online 6–9 months prior to full implementation. I don’t know if that’s because these online agents plotted their ops that far in advance, if it’s more about online agents stealing other hackers’ ideas, or something else entirely.
By February 13, 2014, the Twitter account for cyberwarzone.com was using Mauritania Attacker’s skull design for Anonghost as the account’s banner so you would expect that Mauritania Attacker’s other hacking team, Teamr00t, supported and promoted the “OpIsrael Reloaded” operation back in July 2012, right? Wrong. That doesn’t appear to be the case — at least not publicly.
Despite tweeting about Israel and all of the absurd hacks they had allegedly carried out, Teamr00t never tweeted the hashtags “#OpIsrael” or “OpIsrael Reloaded” during this time period (again, taking into account they may have deleted tweets).
And although the @Op_Israel account started heavily using the hashtag #opisrael on and after June 21, 2012, which was approximately two weeks before “OpIsrael Reloaded” started, it doesn’t appear that they ever used the entire phrase “OpIsrael Reloaded,” either. Put simply:
@op_israel: Used the hashtags #opisrael and Sabu’s #fuckisrael
@cyberwarzonecom and @occpal: Used the phrase “OpIsrael Reloaded”
@Teamr00t: Busy hacking stupid shite and using the phrase “Fuck USA”
Of course, none of this actually proves anything because bad actors usually like to keep their hands clean and the trail leading to their involvement to a minimum. Easy deniability is key.
Tweets may have also been deleted from this time period or maybe @Teamr00t and @Op_Israel just weren’t interested in the #OpIsrael Reloaded campaign despite the fact that @Op_Israel strongly supported at least one of the accounts that initially promoted it.
August 2012: Steubenville and LocalLeaks.org
I hemmed and hawed about adding the Steubenville story to this article but at the end of the day, this was Cassandra Fairbanks first big entrance into the Anonymous scene so it’s worth a mention. There’s also this little thing called LocalLeaks.org that we should talk about.
On August 11, 2012, a high school teenager from Steubenville, Ohio was raped at a party by members of the high school football team. On August 22nd, the crime made local news and a month later, crime blogger, Alexandria Goddard, was sued for posting about the case on her website, prinniefiled.com.
(Wait, bloggers actually put themselves at risk by publishing truthful and accurate information? You don’t say…)
Meanwhile, there was this hacker, Deric Lostutter (a.k.a. @KYAnonymous), who got involved after running an Anonymous operation against Westboro Church previously. You know, the whole “God hates fags” thing. He started an Anonymous operation called #OpRollRedRoll based off the Steubenville football team’s slogan and he named his “anon troops” #KnightSec.
In December 2012, Lostutter created a video for the new operation, outraged at what appeared to be a coverup happening in a small Ohio town. According to Rolling Stone:
While Lostutter had recorded Op videos for Anonymous in the past, this time he was recording the first one in which he, as KY, would make his debut. Lostutter spent about a half hour crafting his words, which he ran through a text-to-speech program, Cepstral David, to disguise his voice. He matched the audio track along with his video of him gesticulating in his Guy Fawkes mask. ‘Greetings citizens of the world, We are Anonymous,’ he began, ‘Around mid-August 2012 a party took place in a small town in Ohio known as Steubenville…’
The week before, he had read a New York Times story about the rape of a 16-year-old girl and its alleged cover-up in this small town. ‘The more I found out, the more angry I got,’ he recalls, ‘what really got me heated is her friends and everybody else’s friends stood around and watched this shit happen, and nobody did a fucking thing.’
And then the hacks started. Again, according to Rolling Stone, Noah McHugh, a hacker from Virginia Beach who used the handle @JustBatCat, took credit for compromising the football team’s booster site and then “boasted” that he worked for the Department of Defense, meaning that he was protected. The booster site was run by Jim Parks, a fan of the football team whose emails were also hacked and published on a site called LocalLeaks.org.
LocalLeaks.org is a “disclosure platform” that was founded by an Anonymous hacker group in January 2011. Six months later, they started “HackerLeaks,” and according to a 2011 cnet.com article, Chris Doyon (a.k.a. “Commander X”) was the editor in chief of both sites.
In June 2021, Doyon was arrested in Mexico and extradited to the U.S. to face charges “associated with an alleged DDoS attack on the government of Santa Cruz, California,” after allegedly being on the run for almost a decade.
The logo for Local Leaks reminds me of the logo used for Berlin Leaks, another disclosure platform that included the involvement of Ray Johansen, who once claimed that he was sent documents from Guccifer 2 via this platform.
Johansen is also either a longtime associate of Doyon, or his prison support is just one more campaign that Johansen has actively tried to infiltrate. In fact, after Johansen recently posted threats to hunt down multiple people in the United States, including me, and how those meetings would not end well for us, Doyon’s sister tweeted to him about how amazing he looked in a new jacket.
As for the hacks and Jim Parks’ emails, Anonymous encouraged the FBI to investigate him because they alleged that “underage girls” were seen in his emails. Local Leaks even implied that Parks was “being fed photos of the football team’s conquests,” but they were both wrong. Gawker:
If it were just Lostutter, his tweets might have gotten lost in the ether. But he worked in parallel with the website Local Leaks, a Wikileaks-style website that compiled many of these same tips into a big dossier called the Steubenville Files. Local Leaks is run by Christopher Doyon, also known as ‘Commander X,’ a longtime Anonymous hacktivist who made a dramatic escape to Canada from California in 2010 to avoid federal hacking charges…
Doyon is not a reliable source. Once, he boasted to me in an interview that he had access to ‘Every classified database in the U.S.’ Still, Doyon’s site became a go-to information source for many interested in the Steubenville story, its claims repeated widely by respectable news blogs.
But the most explosive facts Anonymous ‘uncovered’ were false. Lostutter and Local Leaks painted a lurid fantasy where ‘Jane Doe’s’ rape was just one of many carried out by a self-identifying ‘rape crew’ of football players, aided and abetted by coaches, law enforcement and Steubenville government officials. A child porn ring, an illegal gambling ring, and a drug ring were all allegedly tied to the rape. Steubenville was a Midwestern hellhole out of a Coen brothers movie.
To date, no proof of any of these allegations has surfaced.
Is any of this starting to sound familiar? It’s almost like the Pizzagate crew, @LizActivate, @An0nAkn0wledge (who is obsessed with catching pedos while his friend, Ray Johansen, runs operations with a hacker who used to host child porn), their deranged associates, and Qanon have been writing the script since 2012.
To make a long story short, although Lostutter had done an enormous amount of good by bringing national attention to the story, he and others also did a lot of damage. And Noah McHugh was correct in his assessment about being protected. Lostutter was charged with the hacks and sentenced to two years in prison.
As noted previously, the Steubenville-Anonymous operation basically introduced Cassandra Fairbanks to the world. At the time, she was living in Pittsburgh working as a sound technician. Two months after the Steubenville rape, she opened her Twitter account @CassandraRules and drove to Ohio to “organise the Occupy Steubenville protests with the help of Anonymous.” Glamour magazine wrote a full write up about it here.
According to Gawker, the media outlet that Peter Thiel destroyed via the Hulk Hogan case, she also ran the Occupy Steubenville Facebook page and was reportedly in contact with Lostutter, #KnightSec, and Commander X.
Two things stood out to me about this case. One is the fact that FBI informant, Brandon Darby, who dated Cassandra Fairbanks, investigated a small town rape case like this a year prior.
I’m not saying that Lutstutter and Darby were working together, but I do find the coincidence interesting since it doesn’t appear that Anonymous got involved in anything like this before.
Second, and more importantly, not only was Commander X running Local Leaks, whose logo looked similar to Johansen’s “BerlinLeaks,” in a book that he published in 2017, he claimed that he was the one who created the @Op_Israel account. However, it is painfully clear that he was less than forthright about the Twitter account and how the #OpIsrael operation got started.
