Cold Open
The following presentation is not suitable for young children. Listener discretion is advised.
On March 17, 2013, sentencing was about to come down in a federal courthouse in New Jersey for one of the biggest cybersecurity trials in years. The hacker at the center of it, known as weev, had been found guilty six months earlier for one count of identity fraud and one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization.
SFX: GAVEL COMING DOWN
Three years before, weev and a co-defendant Daniel Spitler had found a glaring security hole in AT&T’s iPad user databases.
SFX: IPAD NOTIFICATION DING
They’d been able to find personal details for more than a hundred thousand people, including Diane Sawyer and Michael Bloomberg.
They went to the site Gawker with the news, and it made for a few months of bad press for AT&T. Within a few months the company fixed their security weakness, but they were mad, so they made sure the FBI prosecuted the people at the center of it. Daniel pled guilty, but weev decided to fight it.
The case rested on such an antiquated law that the government had to jump through massive logistical hoops to even try him since it wasn’t clear what he’d done should even be illegal. Weev hadn’t even damaged anything, or hurt anyone—he hadn’t even had to break into the servers, he simply revealed a massive vulnerability. It’s like getting charged for breaking and entering when the door had been left wide open.
The trial had become a cause celebre in internet security circles. Freedom of speech advocates flocked to defend weev. Noted cyberspace freedom of speech lawyer Tor Ekeland defended him. Wired, The Verge, and other tech outlets ran articles supporting his case.
But despite all that, they had failed to keep him out of trouble, and the grand jury found him guilty. Now lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation would have to hope he could convince the judge he was a rule-following person who deserved a slap on the wrist.
As he settled into his seat, the day of his sentencing, he casually pulled out a tablet with a keyboard and started tweeting in the courthouse.
SFX: TWEET SOUNDS
As part of his pre-sentencing, weev wasn’t allowed to use any kind of computer with a keyboard. When the judge saw him on the tablet, a hush went through the courthouse.
SFX: GASP
“RESTRAIN HIM” called out the bailiff.
He was cuffed, iPad taken, and forced to sit silently while the judge read out his sentence.
SFX: HANDCUFFS GETTING LOCKED
The judge read it out solemnly: 41 months of prison time, followed by 3 years of supervision, as well as $73,000 to be paid to AT&T. The lawyer, Ekeland, winced. weev sat there with a shit-eating grin, he couldn’t care less. Reporters asked how he felt, he just said “great.”
A little bit of prison time wasn’t going to stop the man known as the ugliest hacker in the world.
SFX: PRISON DOORS CLOSING
On this episode: one of the most notorious trolls of all-time, freedom of speech, neo-Nazis, and gaming. I’m Keith Korneluk and this is Modem Mischief.
INTRODUCTION
You're listening to Modem Mischief. In this series we explore the darkest reaches of the internet. We'll take you into the minds of the world's most notorious hackers and the lives affected by them. We'll also show you places you won't find on Google and what goes on down there. This is the story of weev.
Act 1
MUSIC CUE: III. LIFE: THE BIGGEST TROLL [ANDREW AUERNHEIMER] SOUND-ALIKE
An internet troll is somebody who wants to get a reaction out of people, so will say or do whatever it takes to make someone mad. Believe they actually believe the crazy thing they said? Boom—you fell for it. They don’t mean it, they’re just doing it for the lulz.
“Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” one troll told the New York Times in a breathless early expose of the subculture.
They’re sort of class clowns, school bullies, or just pissed off contrarians. Most of them are harmless, or might not even be noticeable. There’s a reason the cliche is “don’t feed the trolls.” Engaging with trolls just makes the trolling go on longer, it’s better most of the time just to roll your eyes and move on. Otherwise you fall for the trap, and give them the lulz.
Most trolling just comes from a pissed-off moment of anger, or just some kid fucking around—there aren’t many real trolls like the media talks about.
But there are some exceptions. Some real deal trolls out there. People who genuinely are mean-spirited pricks who are willing to say whatever it takes to get a rise out of people. Over the last decade, from Gamergate (which we recently covered in Episode 17) to teen suicides like Hannah Smith, online trolling has had serious real-world effects.
And one of the most high-profile and problematic trolls of the last decade has been weev. He’s harassed women online, joined Neo-Nazi groups, and attacked people of color. He’s been arrested, been called the “ugliest hacker in the world,” and even been rapped about by Childish Gambino as a symbol of broken internet culture.
But he’s always toed the line between saying he’s just doing it for a joke, and being a white nationalist. What came first with him, the trolling or the hate? Are we even falling for the trap of taking it seriously, giving him the lulz? Who is weev?
On September 1, 1985, Andrew Alan Escher Auernheimer was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a college town at the southern edge of the Ozarks. He came from a large, mixed-race family with Native American heritage, and Jewish lineage on “both sides of his family” according to his mother Alyse.
Andrew loved computers, and knew he was smart. Or at least always able to convince the people around him that he was. He thought he was meant for better things than just living in a small town in Arkansas, and started listening to opera, and reading Romantic poets like Keats and Byron as a kid
MUSIC CUE: OPERA ARIA
His parents loved political science and rescued animals. His mother was a realtor, and father, Mark, an industrial engineer. Andrew came from a home where they talked liberal politics at the dinner table, and where Bill and Hillary Clinton were revered. They moved to Richmond Virginia when he was in elementary school, where Andrew had real trouble making friends.
He was short, and didn’t think kids his age could keep up with him. All his bragging about how smart he was didn’t make a lot of friends on the schoolyard. So instead he spent his time using the family PC, and learning early internet culture.
SFX: AIM LOGIN DOORWAY SOUND / AIM CHAT NOTIFICATION
At age 14 he convinced his parents and teachers to let him skip past high school to enroll at James Madison University in Harrisonburg Virginia, 4 years younger than everyone around him.
Jumping to college without going through high school would be tough for anyone, especially for someone like Andrew who thought he was the smartest person in the room. Suddenly he was surrounded by clearly more intelligent people, who weren’t impressed that he’d memorized a few poems or knew the difference between an aria and a recitative. And worse, he had to go through the confusing rush of puberty surrounded by 18 year-olds who barely looked at him except as some sort of kid freak.
When he went home for the first break, it must have felt like a relief—he could finally go back to where he was the center of attention. Except that when he went back, he came in for another shock. Around when he was 14 and gone for early college, his parents adopted two younger children.
He wasn’t the center of his parent’s world either, now. If this were a supervillain origin story, this would be the crystalizing moment.
SFX: THUNDER CLAPS
Down at his loneliest point—confused by hormones, lonely, terrified he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, he lashed out at the people who he thought caused this.
His two adopted siblings, Chelsea and Anthony? Both black. The classes that he was struggling with at James Madison? Multicultural, full of students and professors from different backgrounds than him. His parents? Proud of their Native American and Jewish heritage.
This was the moment his white nationalism seemed to really start. He retreated from classes, and started reading more online, looking for sources that confirmed what he thought about the world.
He was going to get revenge against everyone. The liberals. The more grown-up and bigger people. People of other ethnicities. His parents. Everyone who made him feel bad, aka didn’t treat him like the smartest person ever.
SFX: MOUSE CLICKING.
Andrew convinced himself he was too smart for school, so dropped out by the time he was 16.
At 18, he moved to California and stopped returning emails or calling his parents. He started coding to pay the bills. But also he started spending all day on internet forums supposedly doing his own research into how the world works.
His mother thinks that’s when he started getting into drugs. He started taking acid—a lot. He claimed it made him code better:
“You can hack better while you’re tripping,” he said. “It makes me far more relentless.”
And during one of those trips, he came up with the perfect name. He was on a Wikipedia rabbithole when he read about the most destructive animals for farmers. Not a wolf, not a rat, instead something smaller, and more insidious. Like him. The weevil.
SFX: INSECT SWARMS
Or weev, for short.
Just before he turned 21, on Christmas 2006, he blew off his parents completely. He wasn’t Andrew Auernheimer, tech-savvy son of southern liberals anymore. He had become weev, and he was going to be the biggest troll in the world.
MUSIC CUE: OMINOUS SYNTH
Weev started getting heavily involved in 4chan, the notorious messageboard. Specifically, he was a heavy user in /b/, the random category. That category was like a sophisticated bathroom stall, where people just wrote to get rises out of each other and to get all the lulz they could. Weev thrived in this environment.
SFX: POSTING SOUNDS
He could read people well, and would impress 4chan dwellers by quoting poetry, ancient Greek history, and opera, as he bragged about his accomplishments. Some of which were real, some of which… well to put it lightly, are hard to prove.
"Not everything he says is true, not everything he says is false," says Biella Coleman, a McGill University anthropology professor. "That's what makes it so difficult and disorienting to talk to him."
While he was sleeping on a friend’s couch in Southern California, the New York Times profiled him as part of a series on young trolls in 2008, and quoted some of his outlandish stories:
“He is said to have jammed the cellphones of daughters of C.E.O.’s and demanded ransom from their fathers; he is also said to have trashed his enemies’ credit ratings,” journalist Mattathias Schwartz wrote.
Weev boasted he made tens of thousands of dollars, and drove a Phantom Rolls-Royce, before launching into long tirades about white nationalism, anti-semitism dripping off his full lips, his dark eyes big against his slicked back hair.
Needless to say most of that wasn’t true. He didn’t even have a place to live.
But he wasn’t just a pathological liar—a Rolls-Royce did show up during the interview, driven by his girlfriend at the time, Claudia. He didn’t own it, but maybe her Dad did.
He might not have been making tens of thousands of dollars a day, or even have a set living area, but he was still able to convince people that he was the smartest person around, and so do things for him.
And already by 2007, he was trying to get a rise out of people, any way he could. Just ask Kathy Sierra.
SFX: TERRATOPIA STARTUP SOUND-ALIKE ( )
Sierra is a developer and instructor who was massively influential in computer programming culture. If you played adventure games on Windows 95 you probably know her work, she was the lead programmer for the game Terratopia that came standard with Windows 95 machines.
She also co-created the Head First book series published by O’Reilly. These best-selling books tried to make computer programming accessible, and find ways to bring in groups who weren’t usually involved in coding, like underserved communities of color, and women.
In other words, the exact people weev couldn’t stand. And they’d sometimes be on the same messageboards, since her blog was read all over the programming world. Sierra would answer questions about coding, and try to police the trolls. It drove weev crazy, and he would needle her.
She didn’t just back off though, she’d get defensive when he’d write mean things about her, and treat him like she was a Mom telling off a teenager.
He was going to teach her a lesson.
SFX: BIRDS SINGING
In early March 2007, she woke up to a typical day. She made coffee, let the dog out, then went to go check her computer. She was expecting an email from the organizers of an O’Reilly conference in San Diego she was planning to attend in a week.
SFX: EMAIL DING
Nothing from the O’Reilly conference, but there were hundreds of emails from strangers.
SFX: MOUSE CLICK
What the hell? she asked herself as she opened the first one. Maybe Then gasped.
It was a picture of her, with a noose around her neck.
Jesus, she thought as she closed the message fast.
SFX: MOUSE CLICK
She opened the next: it was just text, threatening her.
SFX: MANY MOUSE CLICKS
They were all harassing. And… some of them had personal information about her. Social Security. Home address.
No god, no more. She thought, walking away. Behind her hundreds more emails piled up.
SFX: EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS
SFX: PHONE RINGS.
Kathy Sierra got thousands of threatening emails, phone calls, and blog posts written about her, full of personal information that strangers on the internet shouldn’t have, as well as lies claiming she slept her way to the top. She canceled going to the O’Reilly conference, and gave an interview where she blamed the trolls for harassing her.
SFX: WAY MORE EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS, MERGING WITH PHONE RINGING, DOOR KNOCKING
That didn’t put out the fire, it just fanned the flames of the trolls.
Who did this? She asked herself, and why me?
Sierra ended up quitting blogging, saying I had no desire then to find out what comes after doxxing, especially not with a family.
Weev kept quiet for a little while, but within a year started bragging that he’d taken her down. He was the one who’d found her social security number and started the harassment. Other trolls joined in, but his hate had been the fuel.
And weev was just getting started.
Act 2
By the late 2000s, 20-something Andrew Auernheimer had embraced his new persona as “weev” the crusading troll. He frequented 4chan and programming message boards, and led a charge to harass and dox a female programmer and teacher.
But weev wanted to use his power online to shape the offline world too. And he had a bit of a messianic streak.
SFX: MONASTIC CHANTING
In 2009 weev registered the “Last Church of Christ” as a business in West Hollywood, where he was staying at the time. Under the “Last Church” he started producing podcasts under the name of the “iProphet”. Every episode he would spew forth on racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, where he’d blame Jews and homosexuals for anything wrong in the country.
SFX: MICROPHONE TAPPING
Was it serious, did he really believe all of this? Was it just a tasteless joke he made, not caring if it hurt people? It seems like both. He might have been trying to offend people for the lulz, but he also definitely targeted the groups he railed against in the iProphet podcast and blog.
He really seemed to blame them for all of his problems—even the ones that most people would say are his own damn fault. Like how in 2008 his craiglist posts kept getting reported because he was looking for women who wanted to have sex and do heroin with him. weev got it in his head that this was the fault of the so-called “gay lobby” flagging his posts.
SFX: CONTENT REPORT FLAG NOTIFICATION
And weev had decided that he wasn’t just going to go after individuals, like his 2007 harassment of Kathy Sierra. He wanted to change the world, and that meant going after institutions. And after his own experience with getting posts flagged as inappropriate, he decided he was going to get revenge.
MUSIC CUE: OMINOUS BUT DRIVING SYNTH
For his first attack, he was going to use the content flagging that he felt had been used against him, to go after others. He studied content reporting tools on other sites, and realized that it would be easy to exploit for nefarious purposes.
“The hypocricy of the gay community disgusted me,” he blogged, “So I decided to get them back.”
After some research, he figured out that Amazon would pull a product from its search and best seller listings for content review if it had enough content flags.
SFX: CONTENT REPORT FLAG NOTIFICATION
And it wouldn’t take that many flags to get something pulled—only a few dozen. If a book got pulled, it would be sent to the customer service department to confirm whether or not it should be permanently pulled, or put back in place. In theory a system that worked fine, but they hadn’t met weev yet.
So weev built a code to auto report books for inappropriate content, regardless of what was in them. He then found every LGBTQ+ book he could find, and put them in a target ist.
But he didn’t want to fire off his scripts half-cocked: he wanted to make a splash. So he waited until the company would be most vulnerable to the attack.
SFX: PEOPLE PLAYING ON THE BEACHr
He chose to strike Easter Weekend, 2009. Because of the holiday, Amazon’s customer service team was lightly staffed, and stretched thin. Any content moderation would take longer to clear.
So late at night on Friday April 10th, he fired off his script.
SFX: LOTS OF CONTENT REPORT FLAG NOTIFICATION
Within minutes, hundreds of books were removed from Amazon’s search page, for the supposed crime of featuring LGBTQ+ themes. And then he waited.
It didn’t take long for people to notice something was wrong.
SFX: TWITTER DING
Where did my books go? One author wrote Amazon’s chat help. Thousands came to Twitter to ask what was going on. Was Amazon censoring homosexual content?
Confused Amazon employees had no idea what was going on. And the customer service team was trying to clear their queues as fast as they could, but every time they cleared one book, weev’s script would go into action, and the book would get flagged again and taken off the site.
SFX: YELLING AND SHOUTING
It was chaos, and weev was overjoyed.
But engineers at Amazon came back to work on Easter Sunday to figure out what was happening. They changed the content reporting system so weev’s script couldn’t trigger it any more, and they brought in extra help to clear the help desk’s queue.
By late Sunday night, the problem had been solved. The books were back up, and weev’s script disabled. But people still don’t know what had happened. Even Amazon wasn’t sure if it had been something in their algorithm gone wrong.
So Monday morning, April 13th, weev came forward and took credit in a livejournal post that started: “how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code.”
People were mad at him, of course, but a small group of people on 4chan didn’t see this as him doing anything wrong, per se. It was more like he’d discovered a vulnerability, and had made sure the company fixed it. In some ways, wasn’t it good that he’d done this, since now Amazon’s content rules had gotten better because of this?
It was a stretch, but weev played into it, making his case to friendly figures that he was a white hat hacker, and the homophobia was just a joke.
Riding high from exploiting a security vulnerability in a major company, weev started looking for more security holes.
He teamed up with a hacker friend, Daniel Spitler, to go hunting for more oversights like Amazon’s content opening. They would start their own white hat hacking firm that they named after a popular troll image link from the time: “goatse”. If you’re unfamiliar with the term “goatse”, buckle up friends because you’re in for something (maybe pause if young kids are in the car). A “goatse” is an innocuous looking link that would take people to a picture of someone stretching their butthole wide open. Yeah. You’re welcome.
SFX: SOMEONE GAGGING IN DISGUS
It pissed people off, and it made weev laugh. And weren’t they themselves just trying to find security holes and spread them wide open for companies? They were just like the meme.
Goatse spent the next year looking for exploits that could get them back in the news. And eventually they found something:
SFX: TELEPHONE SIGNALS
AT&T had signed on to be an early partner with Apple for rolling out their hot new iPad personal tablet in 2010. Adopters could use AT&T cell service with their new tablets, linking their email addresses with the device. In theory it was private, but there was a workaround in case someone lost access to their email.
If the user went to a specific area on AT&T’s service, and typed in the serial number, their email address would pop up. It didn’t seem like a big security flaw, because someone would have to have the specific machine’s identifying number. And if you’ve ever looked at an Apple serial number, you know it’s a long sequence of numbers and letters, not exactly easy stuff.
But also, if you’ve ever looked at a serial number, you’d know they all follow the same format. A committed hacker with time on their hands couldn’t figure out specific serial numbers, but they could figure out plausible numbers. Especially it would be easier for them because they knew the model numbers, and that AT&T seemed to have reserved a specific block of the tablets.
So weev went to the site, and put in what he thought was a realistic serial number.
“AD/C…” he typed in…
SFX: ERROR NOISE
No big deal, he’d just try another combination of letters and numbers:
“AD/W… “
SFX: DING!
User information came up for an IT professional in Lansing, Michigan.
He typed in another one, changing one digit…
SFX: DING!
A graphic designer from El Sereno.
This is what I’m talking about, weev thought to himself.
He wrote a script to input hundreds of thousands of serial numbers and put it into a spreadsheet, then went to lunch.
SFX: DING DING DING!
When weev came back, he had a .csv file with thousands of email addresses and personal information. And these were early adopters, which meant that these were tech-savvy people with money, or who liked to have the new Apple fashion accessories. People like Michael Bloomberg, then mayor of New York, and Diane Sawyer.
Holy shit, weev thought as he called Daniel.
SFX: PHONE RINGS
You’ve got to see this, we hit paydirt.
Over the next week they tweaked the script, and were able to get hundreds of thousands of accounts. This was what they’d been looking for.
They contacted AT&T. Who at first didn’t believe them, until weev found someone else to tell their IT department. At that point, IT tried it themselves.
SFX: DING!
Oh shit.
At that point, AT&T went into overdrive to protect their info, and within the week the security hole had been filled.
Job well done! Daniel thought. But weev wasn’t ready to quit yet.
Daniel wanted to use the information for the lulz; maybe send some prank messages to the emails they’d found, and move on. But weev wanted people to know what they’d done. And to take credit. Like always, he wanted the world to know he was smart, and had outsmarted AT&T.
We gotta tell the news, he said.
Daniel wasn’t sure. This was probably illegal—they’d grabbed user account information for hundreds of thousands of people. Weev convinced Daniel that they hadn’t done anything wrong, they’d done exactly what they set out to do—find security holes, and help fix them. If AT&T didn’t tell anyone what they’d done, what was the point? After an intense back and forth, Daniel agreed, but where would they send it?
By now, Weev had a reputation. No outlet wanted to work with him, except for one. Gawker—the gossipy news site that would publish things other places wouldn’t, and didn’t care if they pushed buttons in search of a story. Exactly the place weev wanted.
SFX: WEB PAGE PUBLISHING
On June 10th, 2010, Gawker published the story. It immediately embarrassed AT&T. Why would people choose them over Verizon if they couldn’t keep some group of butthole-obsessed antisemitic trolls from stealing their information?
AT&T’s executives met with their lawyers.
SFX: PEOPLE FILING INTO A ROOM
And after a long meeting where they talked about suing weev and Daniel, they hit on something better.
They were going to call the FBI.
Weev was going to go down.
Act 3
MUSIC CUE: OMINOUS SYNTH
By late 2010, Andrew Auernheimer, the notorious troll known as weev, had made his mark on the internet. He’d grown from posting racist edgelord memes on 4chan to trolling some of the biggest companies in the world: first Amazon in 2009, then AT&T in 2010.
He’d exposed security holes in their services that embarrassed the companies, and was riding high. He was one of the highest profile hackers in the world right now, giving interviews to Gawker, and being recognized as the dude who took down AT&T!
But he’d also pissed off a lot of people. Both for embarrassing big companies, and for harassing women, LGBTQ groups, and people of color. His politics had always skirted what was socially acceptable. When people interviewed him, he would invariably start to claim outlandish racist theories that sounded more like they belonged to a KKK member than a hacker.
And after writing sinister livejournal posts in 2009, weev got questioned by the FBI. Someone had been making threatening calls to some synagogues in Portland at the same time as weev was posting antisemitic comments, and cagily claiming he was going to go visit Portland soon.
SFX: DOOR KNOCKING
For a few hours the FBI interrogated weev in his southern california home, before realizing he was more talk than action. He was harmless, nothing to be scared of. They ended up arresting someone else for making the threatening calls. But weev was furious.
He claimed he was the victim of a vast Jewish conspiracy that was out to get him. He started getting more and more involved in right-wing politics. If not for the hacking he did with Daniel Spitler under the name Goatse Security, he’d probably have gotten really involved in white nationalism.
During this time he pissed off all the people he’d been able to couchsurf off of in California. Desperate, 24-year-old weev even thought about moving back in with his parents in Virginia.
Who knows how close he came to calling them, and asking for their help. But before he could, he got a text from his mother Alyse.
What did you do? She asked, then sent a link to a blog post.
Someone, mad at weev about his antisemitic rants, had posted personal information about him and his whole estranged family online. There was his younger sister Charlotte’s college info, who he had no relationship with. There was the whole family. All linked by association to his racist rants.
He couldn’t go home now.
SFX: MESSAGE DELETING
With a sigh he deleted the message and blocked the number, not even bothering to reply. Instead he packed his bags, and started calling anyone who would pick up a phone.
SFX: AIRPLANE TAKING OFF
And that’s how he ended up back in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he’d been born. A childhood acquaintance let him crash on a tree-lined street in-between a sorority house and a ministry, appropriately enough called Shady Avenue.
It was a quiet little suburban area, not too far from where he’d grown up. The house he was staying in had been owned by a piano teacher before this, so parents would sometimes call the landline looking to enroll their kids. Every time they’d call, weev would fuck with them. He had fun: he loved pissing people off.
And all during this time, his FBI file hadn’t been closed. Instead each piece got added. The Amazon hack? Not quite illegal enough to make a good case. The harassment of Kathy Sierra—awful, but not a federal crime.
SFX: MOUSE CLICKS
So in 2010, when lawyers from AT&T, out for blood after he’d embarrassed them, reached out to the FBI to see if they could investigate weev, the agency was ready.
SFX: KNOCKS
In January 2011, weev opened the door, expecting to find another kid looking for piano lessons. As he walked to the door, he thought about what he could do to freak out the parents. Talk in a racist accent? Take off his pants?
SFX: DOOR OPENS
Freeze!
An FBI team stood on his doorway, warrants in hand.
One agent handcuffed him, while the others went inside to search.
As neighbors watched: agents brought out LSD, cocaine, and dozens of unprescribed pharmaceuticals.
SFX: GAVEL COMES DOWN
MUSIC CUE: DRIVING SYNTH
weev was charged for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or CFAA—the sweeping federal anti-hacking law passed in 1986 in the wake of the 414 teen hacker scandals (for more on that, listen the 414’s, listen to episode 12 where we cover them in great detail).
He was released on a $3,160 bail pending state trial, and given a gag order so he wouldn’t talk about it to the press. Which—surprise surprise—he broke immediately. He contacted every journalist he could find, and took to twitter to raise money on Paypal to pay for his legal costs.
The FBI wanted to stop him from going online, since a little misdemeanor charge wasn’t going to stop him.
But there was one problem: just breaking the CFAA wasn’t enough to give him any jail time. They’d have to charge him with a felony.
And that’s where things get dicey: A government lawyer realized that weev had also technically broken New Jersey state law by releasing all the emails from the AT&T leak. Breaking the CFAA and New Jersey state law elevated it to a felony.
But he was in Arkansas when it happened. His co-conspirator was in California. And the servers they’d accessed were in Georgia. None of those states had those laws.
The FBI lawyers decided to argue that since about 4% of the victims were from New Jersey, they could charge him there. Jackpot, that was good enough to start a federal trial in the garden state.
Daniel, the other member of Goatse, accepted a plea bargain to avoid prison. But weev had always had a messianic streak. Even if he went to jail, it would be worth it for him.
And… the thing is… a lot of people who care about civil liberties agreed with him, in this instance. The Electronic Frontier Foundation took on his case, along with celebrated lawyer Tor Ekeland. Wired, The Verge, and other tech outlets started speaking out for him.
Because even if what he’d done was wrong, it was wild to them that a 25-year-old law about entirely different types of hacking was being applied to him. And worse that it was being turned into a felony despite his total lack of connection to the state where he was being tried. They saw it as a gross overreach by federal law.
And if it had been anyone else, probably the case would have been dropped. But weev just didn’t make any friends. They’d set him up with friendly interviews in their offices, where he just had to act like he was a reasonable person who cared about civil liberties. Instead, he’d look like a wildh-aired madman in dirty clothes, snorting coke in waiting rooms and going on about the vast Jewish conspiracy to take him out. He just couldn’t stop from pissing off people.
When the grand jury put down their verdict on November 20, 2012, it wasn’t a surprise: guilty.
The night before his sentencing, he got on reddit for an AMA (ask me anything). Someone asked if he had any regrets.
I shouldn’t have been so nice to AT&T. Next time I won’t tell them I stole their shit, he replied.
What are you going to do after you get out of jail? Someone asked.
I want to get elected to congress so I can hack from the house of representatives floor.
At the Electronic Frontier Foundation offices, they read the AMA and groaned.
Good luck getting the judge to drop the charges now… they thought.
At the prosecutors, they cheered and high-fived. This guy was going to go down.
The next morning weev walked up the stairs to the Newark courthouse, and a journalist asked if he had anything to say. He turned, and theatrically shouted:
"I'm going to jail for doing arithmetic."
SFX: PRESS SHOUTING
Sentencing came down: the judge read out selections from the AMA the night before as reason to give full jail time. He was going to prison for 41 months.
SFX: JAIL CELL DOORS CLOSING
While Tor Ekeland and the Electronic Frontier Foundation worked on appealing his case, weev served time in the low-security federal prison Allenwood Low, 75 miles north of Harrisburg.
There, weev stayed weev. He kept getting access to twitter and fundraising. When guards told him to knock it off, he called them pedophiles. He started harassing other inmates, and befriending the Aryan Brotherhood. One day he got a big swastika tattooed covering his chest. If there was any doubt if he was serious about the racism or not, this sure seemed like it answered that.
After a few months of this, the guards got him transferred to solitary in a higher-security wing. Weev claimed it wasn’t his fault, that:
You see, if you're white, and you're listening to classical music and reading poetry in federal prison, then you’re classified as a terrorist-white supremacist.
But, again… he got a swastika tattooed on his chest.
SFX: TATTOO NEEDLE
His prison time was starting to draw to a close though, even as he got more radicalized the longer he spent behind bars. On July 1, 2013, his legal team filed their appeal with the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. While they had raised money from combatting the overly vague nature of the CFAA law, what they specifically argued was that the New Jersey venue of the trial had been bullshit.
The FBI weakly asked the judges to keep an open mind since the law was the best tool they had in a changing world, but the court didn’t have it.
On April 11, 2014, they overturned his conviction: weev shouldn’t have been tried in New Jersey weev would go free.
A journalist from Vice drove him—weev had raised over $3,000 for a post-jail party that he’d have back in Brooklyn that night. The first thing weev did as he got into the car was put on white power music.
There's no crime in being white! He sang along. Ecstatic, the tip of the swastika peeking out from under his t-shirt.
weev was free, and ready to go on a rampage.
Act 4
Weev, the notorious troll had spent the late 2000s with plausible deniability about whether he was really a white nationalist, or if he just was trying to piss people off by being shocking.
But after first harassing female programmers, abusing Amazon’s content system to delist LGBTQ books, and leaking emails for hundreds of thousands of people from AT&T, he had brought the attention of the government on him. He served a year in prison, but had been released in spring 2014 due to civil liberties lawyers who thought it didn’t matter how bad a person he might be—he shouldn’t go to jail for it.
But during his jail time, his white nationalism went from being maybe just a troll, to being undeniable. He got a swastika tattooed on his body, and befriended members of the Aryan Brotherhood.
MUSIC CUE: OPERATIC TECHNO
And when he got out of jail in 2014, he removed any possibility of confusion. In late 2014, he left the US, set to move to somewhere without extradition. He used the money he’d raised while in prison to move—first to Lebanon, then to Ukraine, before settling in Transnistria—a breakaway Moldovan region friendly to Vladimir Putin’s Russian government.
There he joined the notorious neo-nazi website The Daily Stormer as its Chief Technology Officer. He helped use the troll tactics he’d refined, in service of white nationalist harassment. The Daily Stormer said it had a Troll Army, and he was a general.
Over the next years they targeted Black, Jewish, and gay Americans in targeted harassment they called “troll storms.” weev found a way to make university printers connected to networks print out antisemitic rants. What they were doing was illegal, but he wasn’t living anywhere the FBI could get to him.
In 2017, the Daily Stormer’s site was pulled down by American web hosts after weev and others wrote articles calling for their troll army to attend the funeral for Heather Heyer—the woman murdered by an alt-right terrorist at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville. The site was taken down, and access to Paypal revoked. They’ve stayed afloat by raising money via bitcoin, and staying on Russian webhosts.
During all this, weev hasn’t talked to his parents. Alyse, when asked in an interview, said she still wants a relationship with him. She just wants him to cut the bullshit and find a positive path in life, maybe go back and finish school. But weev hasn’t talked to them, instead has run to the opposite side of the Earth, to find an insular group cut off from the rest of the world, to keep being the smartest guy in the room.
And when asked, to this day, he still says he’s just a simple guy. Everything’s he’s done has been for a single reason: he’s just doing it for the lulz.
I’m Keith Korneluk and you’re listening to Modem Mischief.
CREDITS
Thanks for listening to Modem Mischief. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe or follow button in your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss an episode. This show is an independent production and is wholly supported by you, our listeners and the best way to support the show is to share it. And another way to support us is on Patreon. For as little as $5 a month you’ll receive an ad-free version of the show plus monthly bonus episodes exclusive to subscribers. Modem Mischief is brought to you by Mad Dragon Productions and is created, produced and hosted by me: Keith Korneluk. This episode is written and researched by David Burgis. Edited, mixed and mastered by Greg Bernhard aka He’ll Wear the GoPro to Bed With You. The theme song “You Are Digital” is composed by Computerbandit. Sources for this episode are available on our website at modemmischief.com. And don’t forget to follow us on social media at @modemmischief. Thanks for listening!