By Brian McWilliams
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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Chapter 1

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People are stupid, Davis Wolfgang Hawke thought as he stared at the nearly empty box of swastika pendants on his desk. It was April 22, 1999, two days after the one-hundredth anniversary of Adolph Hitler's birth. Dozens of orders for the red-and-black necklaces had been pouring into his Knights of Freedom (KOF) Nationalist Party web site every week since he built it nine months ago. The demand nearly outstripped what his supplier could provide, but Hawke wasn't celebrating his e-commerce success. As he stuffed the remaining pendants into padded envelopes and addressed them, Hawke gazed out the window of his mobile home at the hazy South Carolina sky and thought: This is the ultimate hypocrisy. If even half of these people actually joined the party, I would have a major political movement. Instead, all they want is a pretty, shiny pendant.

And if a snoopy reporter for the local paper hadn't recently blown his cover, Hawke might not have been spending all of the web site's income on rent, telephone, and electricity bills for the double-wide just off Highway 221 in Chesnee. But Hawke was forced to move into the trailer in March, after secretly operating KOF.net for six months from the dorm room his parents paid for at Wofford College in nearby Spartanburg. Hawke had always been an anomaly at the pricey Methodist school, with his penchant for dressing all in black, wearing his dark hair in a ponytail, and sporting a push-broom mustache. But the 20-year-old junior had managed to hold down a 3.8 grade point average as a double major in German and history without anyone knowing he was also the founder and chief executive director of the Knights of Freedom. His room in Shipp Hall had been festooned with Nazi flags, Hitler videos, and a collection of knives, but Hawke did no proselytizing on campus. In fact, he had little social contact with other students.

Although his ultimate goal was one day to be elected the nation's first white-power president, Hawke knew he had to lay some groundwork before his philosophy would become mainstream. That task would make him a target for leftists and the media. To shield himself, even with party comrades and web site visitors, Hawke used the pseudonym "Bo Decker" and listed a post office box in Walpole, Massachusetts as the Knights of Freedom mailing address.

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Birth of a Spam King

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People are stupid, Davis Wolfgang Hawke thought as he stared at the nearly empty box of swastika pendants on his desk. It was April 22, 1999, two days after the one-hundredth anniversary of Adolph Hitler's birth. Dozens of orders for the red-and-black necklaces had been pouring into his Knights of Freedom (KOF) Nationalist Party web site every week since he built it nine months ago. The demand nearly outstripped what his supplier could provide, but Hawke wasn't celebrating his e-commerce success. As he stuffed the remaining pendants into padded envelopes and addressed them, Hawke gazed out the window of his mobile home at the hazy South Carolina sky and thought: This is the ultimate hypocrisy. If even half of these people actually joined the party, I would have a major political movement. Instead, all they want is a pretty, shiny pendant.

And if a snoopy reporter for the local paper hadn't recently blown his cover, Hawke might not have been spending all of the web site's income on rent, telephone, and electricity bills for the double-wide just off Highway 221 in Chesnee. But Hawke was forced to move into the trailer in March, after secretly operating KOF.net for six months from the dorm room his parents paid for at Wofford College in nearby Spartanburg. Hawke had always been an anomaly at the pricey Methodist school, with his penchant for dressing all in black, wearing his dark hair in a ponytail, and sporting a push-broom mustache. But the 20-year-old junior had managed to hold down a 3.8 grade point average as a double major in German and history without anyone knowing he was also the founder and chief executive director of the Knights of Freedom. His room in Shipp Hall had been festooned with Nazi flags, Hitler videos, and a collection of knives, but Hawke did no proselytizing on campus. In fact, he had little social contact with other students.

Although his ultimate goal was one day to be elected the nation's first white-power president, Hawke knew he had to lay some groundwork before his philosophy would become mainstream. That task would make him a target for leftists and the media. To shield himself, even with party comrades and web site visitors, Hawke used the pseudonym "Bo Decker" and listed a post office box in Walpole, Massachusetts as the Knights of Freedom mailing address.

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The Education of an Anti-Spammer

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Susan Gunn's first personal computer seemed preloaded with an endless supply of junk email. Almost from the moment she first signed on to America Online, even before she had given her newly minted email address to friends and relatives, Gunn began receiving electronic messages from total strangers who wanted to sell her all manner of products she didn't want, including pornography, body-part enlargement, and software that would enable her to enter the exciting and rewarding business of junk email.

Who are these people and how did they get my address? wondered Gunn, a resident of Stanton, California, a small, palm-tree-studded city built on land originally intended as a sewage farm for neighboring Anaheim. Gunn had bought the PC ostensibly to computerize some of her work as the property manager of a condominium complex owned by her father. But for Gunn, divorced and in her mid-forties, the computer was also a link from her sometimes too-quiet home office in the gated community to the brave new world known as the Internet.

It was late 1998. AOL had recently acquired its rivals Netscape and CompuServe and boasted around 15 million members. The dot-com bubble was still inflating rapidly, as new users such as Gunn swarmed online and began making purchases. But e-commerce wasn't only being conducted by high-profile dot-coms such as eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo!. Entrepreneurs of all types were trying to cash in on the information superhighway, including, apparently, the anonymous folks who had somehow gotten her email address, which they felt entitled them to barge through her virtual front door whenever they wanted.

At first Gunn blamed AOL for the messages. She assumed the online service had sold her name as soon as she signed up. But when she phoned the company to complain, a customer support representative assured her that was not the case. The rep said to forward any unwanted messages to a special email address, and AOL would investigate. For a few weeks, Gunn dutifully obliged, but the junk email kept on coming. In some cases the incoming spam stated that if she wanted to be removed from the sender's list, she needed to visit a special web page and type in her email address. But that had no effect. And whenever she hit the "reply" button and told the spammers to knock it off, her replies went unanswered or were returned as undeliverable. Either the return address on the original message didn't exist, or the mailbox on the other end was crammed to capacity.

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Ho, Ho, Ho, the Nazis Didn't Show

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In a matter of days, orders from Davis Hawke's eBay auctions started to roll in. He found that buyers, caught up in the excitement of the auction, were often willing to bid more than double the price he'd charge for the same item at the KOF site. And since eBay was brokering the deal, there was less of a chance of someone ripping him off with a bad check. The new, tax-free cash flow helped allay his fears about having to take a humiliating civilian job that summer, such as flipping burgers at McDonalds or mowing lawns for the ground crew at Wofford.

As classes finally ended in mid-May 1999, Hawke turned his attention to drafting what he called the Millennium Plan—a long-term strategy for turning the Knights of Freedom into a mainstream political party. The first step would be a new name, the American Nationalist Party (ANP), and a new web site, ANParty.com. To broaden the movement's appeal, Hawke decided he'd drop the Nazi graphics and replace them with American flags, bald eagles, and other patriotic symbols. He'd phase out using the Bo Decker moniker. To cap off the change, that summer ANP members would assemble at the group's to-be-built training camp on some property owned by a comrade in Virginia. They'd spend a weekend setting up a shooting range and an obstacle course. And there would be time for camaraderie with other proud Aryans. Then, by the end of the summer, the ANP would stage a massive rally in Washington, D.C., where he would give a speech in front of the White House.

In preparation for the event, Hawke had been on the phone with city police and the National Park Service about getting a demonstration permit. The bureaucrats seemed confused by the name of Hawke's group; he had to correct them several times when they referred to it as the American Nazi Party or the Nationalist Movement. The city, apparently still jumpy from a Ku Klux Klan march down Constitution Avenue in 1990 that resulted in injuries and arrests, wanted an accurate estimate of how many protestors would assemble and a detailed plan about where they would march and give speeches.

Since the

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Spamford Meets Hacker-X

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From skimming old Nanae messages, Susan Gunn learned that anti-spammers were flush with power when she found the newsgroup in early 1999. They had rallied to force Sanford Wallace, the Internet's biggest spammer, into retirement just the year before. Wallace, who was head of Philadelphia-based Cyber Promotions, had emerged as a spam king in 1995 and boasted that his firm generated twenty-five million junk emails per day on behalf of clients ranging from pornography sites to spam-software vendors. By some estimates CyberPromo.com was responsible for 80 percent of the spam on the Net.

Unlike most spammers who chose to remain in the shadows, Wallace, a large man in his early twenties, regularly tangled with junk email opponents in Nanae discussions. Wallace argued that he was an entrepreneur and that spamming was his First Amendment right. Although he disliked being called a spammer—he preferred to say that he was in the bulk email business—Wallace eventually embraced the nickname given him by anti-spammers: Spamford. But while they may have admired his chutzpah, Nanae regulars abhorred Wallace's business practices, which included falsifying the return address on his spam messages, so that he wouldn't have to deal with complaints or bounces—the error messages returned by mail systems when they received an undeliverable message.

Anti-spammers cheered in late 1996 and early 1997 when Wallace was hit by successive lawsuits from a dozen ISPs. The litigation sought to establish some legal guidelines in what had previously been uncharted waters. AOL argued that it was not obligated to deliver email solicitations to its members from spammers such as CyberPromo. EarthLink alleged that Wallace had violated state and federal business laws by incessantly spamming its subscribers. EarthLink's attorney, Pete Wellborn, a former college football star turned high-tech lawyer, said CyberPromo was guilty of electronically trespassing on EarthLink's mail servers with its spam.

When Wallace hired a team of lawyers and announced he would fight the lawsuits, an anonymous vigilante decided to take matters into his own hands. He hacked into the Cyber Promotions web site and rummaged through the server. The attacker, who came to be known simply as Hacker-X, gathered up a trove of information, including Wallace's customer list and the administrative password to the machine. Using a stolen account at a university, Hacker-X then posted the information in a March 19, 1997, message to alt.2600, a newsgroup frequented by fans of the hacking magazine

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Chapter 2: Chapter 2

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While most of South Carolina was bracing for the impending arrival of Hurricane Floyd on September 15, 1999, Davis Hawke was calmly surfing the Internet from Chesnee. The hurricane, packing 130 mile-per-hour winds at sea, was expected to make landfall on the Carolina coast that evening. Governor Hodges had ordered the mandatory evacuation of four coastal counties, causing a massive snarl of cars on I-26, the state's biggest highway. Over half a million people sought higher ground ahead of the forecasted damaging winds, heavy rain, and widespread flooding.

A category three storm like Floyd could easily level a flimsy structure like Hawke's rented mobile home. But he was staying put. Chesnee was two hundred miles from the shore, sheltered in the southern foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As evening approached, wind gusts occasionally rattled the trailer's sheet-metal siding, and sporadic sprinkles of rain drummed on the metal roof. But the power and phone service remained on as Hawke logged onto InnovaNet, an ISP in nearby Clemson. Hawke had recently signed up for the service under a new pseudonym, James Kincaid.

Hawke had been spending a lot of time in the trailer since the disastrous rally in Washington, D.C. In recent days, as fall classes resumed at Wofford College, he'd managed to resist a strong seasonal force akin to what migratory birds must experience each autumn. For fifteen years he had found comfort in the cyclic back-to-school ritual. But this year Hawke stayed hunkered down in his trailer, working mostly on his eBay auctions.

Even if he hadn't renounced Wofford, there was no way Hawke could fund a return to the college. His mother had threatened to leave his father unless he completely cut Hawke off financially. So now Hawke was forced to live off his dwindling savings and the income generated by his remaining stock of Nazi knives, buckles, and other paraphernalia. Meanwhile, the college was sending him notices about paying last spring's tuition. And a bank in Spartanburg was on his case for a nearly $5,000 credit card bill. Hawke was a month shy of his twenty-first birthday, and already his credit was nearly shot.

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Hawke Mails the Web Manual

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While most of South Carolina was bracing for the impending arrival of Hurricane Floyd on September 15, 1999, Davis Hawke was calmly surfing the Internet from Chesnee. The hurricane, packing 130 mile-per-hour winds at sea, was expected to make landfall on the Carolina coast that evening. Governor Hodges had ordered the mandatory evacuation of four coastal counties, causing a massive snarl of cars on I-26, the state's biggest highway. Over half a million people sought higher ground ahead of the forecasted damaging winds, heavy rain, and widespread flooding.

A category three storm like Floyd could easily level a flimsy structure like Hawke's rented mobile home. But he was staying put. Chesnee was two hundred miles from the shore, sheltered in the southern foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As evening approached, wind gusts occasionally rattled the trailer's sheet-metal siding, and sporadic sprinkles of rain drummed on the metal roof. But the power and phone service remained on as Hawke logged onto InnovaNet, an ISP in nearby Clemson. Hawke had recently signed up for the service under a new pseudonym, James Kincaid.

Hawke had been spending a lot of time in the trailer since the disastrous rally in Washington, D.C. In recent days, as fall classes resumed at Wofford College, he'd managed to resist a strong seasonal force akin to what migratory birds must experience each autumn. For fifteen years he had found comfort in the cyclic back-to-school ritual. But this year Hawke stayed hunkered down in his trailer, working mostly on his eBay auctions.

Even if he hadn't renounced Wofford, there was no way Hawke could fund a return to the college. His mother had threatened to leave his father unless he completely cut Hawke off financially. So now Hawke was forced to live off his dwindling savings and the income generated by his remaining stock of Nazi knives, buckles, and other paraphernalia. Meanwhile, the college was sending him notices about paying last spring's tuition. And a bank in Spartanburg was on his case for a nearly $5,000 credit card bill. Hawke was a month shy of his twenty-first birthday, and already his credit was nearly shot.

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Shiksaa, the Spammer Tracker

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Though she was a quick study, Shiksaa's first attempts at anti-spamming were fraught with rookie mistakes. On one occasion she angrily LARTed (filed an abuse report about) a company that had sent her spam and was later forced sheepishly to confess to Nanae that she had voluntarily signed up to receive mailings from the firm. Another time a Nanae veteran chewed her out for posting a 700-line message containing the entire contents of a FAQ on spam, rather than just providing a hyperlink to the document. Her tendency to become verbally combative when insulted or threatened also put her at odds with some newsgroup participants. When one of Nanae's resident trolls—a term used to describe newsgroup users who posted messages aimed at annoying other participants—argued once that anti-spammers were akin to the Ku Klux Klan, Shiksaa launched into a vehement counter-attack.

"Your mistake is that you assume anyone cares what you think," Shiksaa snapped back. "When you stop talking out of your derrière and want to help stamp out spam, come on back," she wrote. The man responded by addressing her as "whorebot" and deriding her behavior as "typical of juniors enlisted into vigilante causes." The conversation (or thread in Usenet-speak) ended after several Nanae regulars rallied to Shiksaa's defense.

Though it didn't stanch the flow of junk email into her AOL account, Shiksaa found herself spending a couple of hours each day reading and commenting on Nanae. She enjoyed bantering with the newsgroup's regulars, who had a twisted and sometimes scathing sense of humor that she found exhilarating. At one point she even signed up for membership in the group's official anti-spam club, The Lumber Cartel. It was formed in 1997 as a humorous response to assertions by some bulk emailers that wood-products companies were funding anti-spammers in order to preserve paper-based direct-mail promotions.

The Cartel's web site featured images of clear-cut forests and logging trucks piled high with timber. At the site, prospective members could type their names into a form, click a button, and out would pop a certificate bearing the new member's name, membership number, and the following words:

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Shiksaa Plays Peacemaker

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Eight copies of Hawke's Web Manual ad somehow landed in the America Online in-box of Karl Gray, an AOL user in London. Like most ISPs in the United Kingdom at the time, AOL's service was metered, which meant that Gray paid a per-minute charge while online. Downloading and dealing with spam therefore wasn't just a nuisance; it cost him money. While most AOL users might have deleted the Web Manual ads in disgust, Gray posted a copy of the spam to a newsgroup named alt.stop.spamming, along with the words, "Any one want to help me wage war?"

Morely Dotes, the online alias of a Nanae regular named Richard Tietjens, spotted Gray's posting during his regular morning sweep through anti-spam newsgroups. Dotes looked up the domain registration record for WebManual2000.com and posted the information as a reply to Gray's message. Dotes also noted in his message that the ad's headers indicated it had been transmitted from an InnovaNet user operating a spam program with "direct-to-MX" capabilities. Such technology routed the ads directly to recipients' email servers, leaving no trace at InnovaNet's mail server.

"It is obvious from the fact that Kincaid used direct-to-MX spamware that he knows what he is doing is wrong," wrote Dotes.

Had Shiksaa been a regular reader of alt.stop.spamming, those words might have inspired her to pounce on the case and run searches on Kincaid's phone number and email address. Eventually, she would have her first online encounter with Hawke. But on that day in September 1999, Shiksaa still stuck mostly to news.admin.net-abuse.email, and she was embroiled in an ugly conflict with Andrew Brunner, the 27-year-old developer of a new program for sending bulk email.

Brunner's Avalanche software was among scores listed at The Spamware Site, which was maintained by a frequent Nanae contributor from England who went by the alias Sapient Fridge. Since most ISPs refused to host sites selling bulk emailing software, business could become quite difficult for any companies named to the Spamware roster. Brunner, a slim, clean-cut, and ordinarily soft-spoken man, was livid when he learned in August 1999 that his Pennsylvania-based firm, CyberCreek, was listed. He complained to spam fighters that they were interfering with his legal right to communicate with prospective customers, and he hurled legal threats at Sapient Fridge, insisting that he remove CyberCreek or risk being sued for defamation.

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Hawke's Publishing Company in a Box

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At the time, Davis Hawke didn't know the term LART, but he knew firsthand its potentially awesome power. Within days of Karl Gray filing complaints about receiving eight Web Manual spams, InnovaNet had shut down Hawke's dial-up account, and Interspeed had pulled the plug on hosting the WebManual2000.com domain—all before Hawke had a chance to make more than a handful of sales. He paced the floor between his office in the trailer and the kitchen. He was ready to move ahead with his life. He had shaved off his push-broom moustache. He'd taken the swastika flags off the walls and the Nazi death's head off his dresser. He'd tossed the remnants of a box of American Nationalist Party business cards into the garbage. He was keen to print up a fresh set bearing the name of his new online enterprise: Venture Alpha Corporation. It frustrated Hawke to know that people were still determined to get in the way of his plans.

Hawke was having a hard time clinging to the belief that greatness was his historical destiny. It had been drilled into him as a boy, when his mother would quiz him at mealtimes on the Ambler family tree—her side of the family. Who did great, great, great Grandmother Polly from Virginia marry? Why, U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall, of course! And who signed their marriage certificate? Then-Governor Thomas Jefferson! And who turned down a marriage proposal from soon-to-be-President Jefferson? Great, great, great, great grandmother Rebecca!

During these dinner-table genealogy lessons, Hawke's father just smiled and listened. They never devoted much conversation to the Greenbaum side of the family. So when Britt's fourth-grade teacher assigned students the project of drawing up a family tree, the young boy focused exclusively on the Ambler clan. When it was Britt's turn to present his project to the class, he unfurled his drawing, which he had labored over for hours with his mother, and began talking about his family's patrician roots.

The teacher took one look at the neatly drawn chart and ordered him back to his seat. "Shame on you, Britt Greenbaum," she scolded, certain he had fabricated it all.

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Chapter 3: Chapter 3

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Jason Vale was in big trouble. For nearly two hours he'd been trapped in a windowless conference room in the U.S. Attorney's office in Brooklyn. A government lawyer was grilling Vale, 29, about his Internet-based apricot seed business, which he operated from his home in Queens, New York. It was April 2000, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had been after Vale's company, Christian Brothers Contracting Corporation, since 1997, when they sent inspectors to his home.

It was just a deposition, but Vale felt like he was already on trial. He really needed to use the bathroom, but his interrogator—a woman in her mid-twenties—wouldn't let up.

"How would you characterize your feeling, your religious beliefs in relation to the work that you do?" asked Allison Harnisch, a trial lawyer with the Department of Justice's Office of Consumer Litigation.

Vale wasn't certain where she was going with the question, but he lurched into his standard answer about how Genesis 1:29 contained a prescription for life without cancer:

Then God said, "I now give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the entire earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food."

There are way too many lawyers in this room, Vale thought. Besides Assistant U.S. Attorney Harnisch, there was Vale's lawyer, another attorney from the Department of Justice, and one from the FDA. Vale was just an online entrepreneur, filling orders in his basement for bags of apricot seeds; tablets of the extract from the seeds called Laetrile, or vitamin B₁₇; as well as an injected form of the compound. He used several computers to send out email advertisements for his web sites, which included apricotsfromgod.com and canceranswer.com. In its 1998 suit against him, AOL claimed that Vale sent an estimated 23.5 million junk emails to AOL members.

Vale didn't have much respect for AOL or the FDA. On his sites' home pages he explained how the pharmaceutical industry pushed the FDA to ban B₁₇, even though many people believed the compound worked as a cancer preventative. (B

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Shiksaa Meets the Cyanide Idiot

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Jason Vale was in big trouble. For nearly two hours he'd been trapped in a windowless conference room in the U.S. Attorney's office in Brooklyn. A government lawyer was grilling Vale, 29, about his Internet-based apricot seed business, which he operated from his home in Queens, New York. It was April 2000, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had been after Vale's company, Christian Brothers Contracting Corporation, since 1997, when they sent inspectors to his home.

It was just a deposition, but Vale felt like he was already on trial. He really needed to use the bathroom, but his interrogator—a woman in her mid-twenties—wouldn't let up.

"How would you characterize your feeling, your religious beliefs in relation to the work that you do?" asked Allison Harnisch, a trial lawyer with the Department of Justice's Office of Consumer Litigation.

Vale wasn't certain where she was going with the question, but he lurched into his standard answer about how Genesis 1:29 contained a prescription for life without cancer:

Then God said, "I now give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the entire earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food."

There are way too many lawyers in this room, Vale thought. Besides Assistant U.S. Attorney Harnisch, there was Vale's lawyer, another attorney from the Department of Justice, and one from the FDA. Vale was just an online entrepreneur, filling orders in his basement for bags of apricot seeds; tablets of the extract from the seeds called Laetrile, or vitamin B₁₇; as well as an injected form of the compound. He used several computers to send out email advertisements for his web sites, which included apricotsfromgod.com and canceranswer.com. In its 1998 suit against him, AOL claimed that Vale sent an estimated 23.5 million junk emails to AOL members.

Vale didn't have much respect for AOL or the FDA. On his sites' home pages he explained how the pharmaceutical industry pushed the FDA to ban B₁₇, even though many people believed the compound worked as a cancer preventative. (B₁₇ couldn't be patented, so, as Vale saw it, drug companies considered it a threat to their profit model.) Sure enough, the FDA had sent him several warning letters stating that Laetrile was not approved as a drug and that he was violating the law by promoting it as a cancer cure. Now it looked like their goal was to get a court order forcing him to stop selling the B

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Hawke Concedes to an Anti

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In the spring of 2000, Davis Hawke decided it was time to get out of South Carolina. In March, he and Patricia moved to Leicester, North Carolina. They were still living in a mobile home, but now they had the Smoky Mountains right outside their door.

The charm of Chesnee had long since worn off, but there was another factor motivating Hawke's move. An Internet user in California—no one Hawke had ever heard of—had sent him a certified letter saying he was suing Hawke for spamming. The first thing Hawke did after they settled into the trailer on Serenity Lane in Leicester was to visit an attorney in Asheville. Hawke figured the lawsuit was a joke, but he wanted a professional opinion. The lawyer told him he could probably ignore the legal threat, but he advised Hawke to incorporate his Internet marketing company. That way Hawke could shield himself from personal liability should someone lob a more serious lawsuit his way.

On that day, March 14, 2000, QuikSilver Enterprises, Inc. became a North Carolina corporation. The next day, Hawke was blasting out his first barrage of spams bearing his new company name. But to keep nosy people off his back, Hawke continued to use his post office box in South Carolina as Quiksilver's mailing address. He'd make the hour-long drive from Leicester to Spartanburg a couple times each week just to gather up any checks or other mail that might have arrived.

Hawke had given up on trying to conceal the origin of his spams by routing them through open mail relays. Instead, he signed up for several accounts using bogus names at ISPs such as Blue Ridge Internet in Hendersonville, Internet of Asheville, or even BellSouth's Internet service. He paid his twenty dollars, sent a couple spam runs, and almost invariably the ISP would cut off service once it got complaints about his junk email. Hawke just chalked up the disposable dial-up accounts as a cost of doing business.

Hawke's desire for a fresh start was also prompted by a series of other business problems the previous winter. In December, bidders on his eBay auctions started leaving negative comments in the feedback section of the auction site. They complained that Venture Alpha, as he had called his online auction business, was slow to mail out products and that emails to it sometimes bounced as undeliverable. Other winning bidders said the stuff he shipped out didn't match the photos they had seen in his auction listings.

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A Date with a Spam Queen

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The newsgroup was abuzz with word that someone had apparently hacked into the computers of a Tennessee spam operation known as Premier Services, downloaded over one hundred megabytes of data, and posted some of the juicier tidbits at a site he entitled Behind Enemy Lines.

"If you are an anti-spammer looking for an inside peek at the world of spamming, you have just found Fort Knox!" wrote the hacker, who identified himself only as "The Man in the Wilderness."

The hacker's site included scores of pages of chat logs and emails between Premier Services's employees and customers. The messages detailed a variety of shady practices, including pump-and-dump stock scams and AOL password-stealing schemes. The hacker's site, originally hosted at an ad-supported service called FreeWebSites.com, also included an assortment of partially nude photos of some of the company's principals.

Prior to that day in June 2000, Premier Services and its owner, 35-year-old Rodona Garst, were unknown to most anti-spammers. But they would soon become the most notorious instance of retaliatory hacking since Hacker-X targeted Sanford Wallace.

According to the Man in the Wilderness's account of events, he had been the victim of a type of online fraud referred to by anti-spammers as a Joe-job. In early 2000, Garst had forged his domain name in the return address of one of Premier Services's spam runs. As a result of the Joe-job, the hacker's mail server was besieged by thousands of error messages generated by undeliverable addresses on Garst's mailing list. The hacker also received complaints from inexperienced anti-spammers who thought he was responsible for Premier's spam. The Man in the Wilderness said he contacted the ISP Garst had used to send the messages, and the provider responded by canceling Premier's account.

"For the spammer responsible, this was warning shot number one," wrote the Man in the Wilderness in Behind Enemy Lines.

But Garst subsequently sent two more spam runs through different accounts, both of which again used the hacker's domain in their return address.

"Normally I am too busy to be bothered with the everyday activities of a small time huckster, but this one was beginning to piss me off," wrote the Man in the Wilderness, who said he worked as an Internet technology consultant. Now determined to take matters into his own hands, he managed to capture one of Garst's spams shortly after it went out. Then, after analyzing the message's header, he identified the network address of the PC used to send the spam.

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Bubba Catts and the Crank Callers

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Brunner's legal threats didn't really worry Shiksaa. He had filed defamation lawsuits in small-claims court against three other anti-spammers, none of whom took the suits very seriously. But Shiksaa didn't relish the idea of spammers harassing her by telephone. Brunner had apparently captured her number when she called him on his cell phone the previous year. Now she had no choice but to contact Pacific Bell and get a new one. But as Shiksaa glanced again at Brunner's file, her face brightened, and she burst into laughter. That wasn't her phone number; Brunner had accidentally transposed two of the digits.

It was a classic Brunner gaffe. Just to be safe, Shiksaa went ahead and had the number changed anyway. But to show Brunner she wasn't worried about his threats, she published two new photos of him at her new web site, Chickenboner.com. (She had acquired the domain name the previous March when the original owner, an Internet businessman in New Brunswick, Canada, failed to renew the registration.)

Shiksaa got the photos from anti-spammers who had doctored a picture of Brunner that appeared in a Fortune magazine article about spam. In the first image, they grafted Brunner's head onto Rodona Garst's naked torso. The other depicted Brunner's head pasted onto the scantily clad body of a Louisiana-based spammer named Robert "Bubba" Catts. Shiksaa had stumbled upon the original Catts photo earlier that year in his AOL member directory listing. The stocky Catts smiled sheepishly, sporting only a pair of skimpy, flowered underpants. He had captioned the photo "This is a pic of me on a WILD NIGHT!!"

Like Brunner, Bubba Catts had become a favorite target for anti-spammer vengeance. He got his start in the spam business in 1997 at the age of forty, after purchasing some bulk email software and launching an ad campaign for a popular marketing scheme. The spams instructed recipients to send five dollars to each of four people listed in the email, including Catts, whose post office box in Shreveport was second on the list. Recipients were supposed to put their own name and address on the top of the list, bumping the fourth person off, and then send the list to as many people as they could. In his spam, Catts said the income he made from the program enabled him to quit his day job selling cars.

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Chapter 4: Chapter 4

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Steve Linford, the operator of the Spamhaus Project, a blacklist of spamware vendors and the ISPs who host them, asked Shiksaa in October 2000 to join an elite team of spam fighters in a new project he was launching. Her mission would be to help compile detailed dossiers on the Internet's biggest junk emailers. The research would be published at Spamhaus.org as part of a pioneering effort Linford had dubbed the Register of Known Spamming Operations, or Rokso. His plan was to turn Rokso into an Internet hall of shame that would put pressure on shadowy spam operations by exposing them to the light of day.

More importantly, Rokso would provide Internet service providers with a much-needed clearinghouse for screening new customers. The Rokso list would include searchable records on each of the spammers, including descriptions of their junk email operations and spam samples, as well as contact information including aliases, business addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. To be included on the Rokso list, a spammer had to have been thrown off at least three Internet service providers. To get off the list, a junk emailer simply needed to refrain from sending spam for at least six months.

Rokso wasn't the first effort to focus public attention on the Internet's egregious bulk emailers. In 1995, Alex Boldt, a mathematics graduate student at the University of California in Santa Barbara, launched the Blacklist of Internet Advertisers. Boldt compiled a small who's-who list of chronic Usenet and email spammers, including their contact information. But Boldt stopped regularly updating his list around 1997, and nothing permanent had arisen in its place—until Rokso.

While the Rokso list would eventually swell to over two hundred, the inaugural edition included just twenty-five spammers. Among them was Jason Vale, who had stopped sending Laetrile spams after the court order and instead had been blanketing the Internet with ads for products such as Willow Flower, an herbal treatment for urination problems and other symptoms of prostate disease. The first version of Rokso also had an entry for 29-year-old Ronnie Scelson, a junior high school dropout who led a group of spammers based in the New Orleans suburb of Slidell.

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Spamhaus Takes on Sue You Net

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Steve Linford, the operator of the Spamhaus Project, a blacklist of spamware vendors and the ISPs who host them, asked Shiksaa in October 2000 to join an elite team of spam fighters in a new project he was launching. Her mission would be to help compile detailed dossiers on the Internet's biggest junk emailers. The research would be published at Spamhaus.org as part of a pioneering effort Linford had dubbed the Register of Known Spamming Operations, or Rokso. His plan was to turn Rokso into an Internet hall of shame that would put pressure on shadowy spam operations by exposing them to the light of day.

More importantly, Rokso would provide Internet service providers with a much-needed clearinghouse for screening new customers. The Rokso list would include searchable records on each of the spammers, including descriptions of their junk email operations and spam samples, as well as contact information including aliases, business addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. To be included on the Rokso list, a spammer had to have been thrown off at least three Internet service providers. To get off the list, a junk emailer simply needed to refrain from sending spam for at least six months.

Rokso wasn't the first effort to focus public attention on the Internet's egregious bulk emailers. In 1995, Alex Boldt, a mathematics graduate student at the University of California in Santa Barbara, launched the Blacklist of Internet Advertisers. Boldt compiled a small who's-who list of chronic Usenet and email spammers, including their contact information. But Boldt stopped regularly updating his list around 1997, and nothing permanent had arisen in its place—until Rokso.

While the Rokso list would eventually swell to over two hundred, the inaugural edition included just twenty-five spammers. Among them was Jason Vale, who had stopped sending Laetrile spams after the court order and instead had been blanketing the Internet with ads for products such as Willow Flower, an herbal treatment for urination problems and other symptoms of prostate disease. The first version of Rokso also had an entry for 29-year-old Ronnie Scelson, a junior high school dropout who led a group of spammers based in the New Orleans suburb of Slidell.

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Shiksaa and the Pink Contracts

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One morning in late October 2000, Shiksaa's phone rang, and the twangy New Orleans voice of Rokso-denizen Ronnie Scelson was on the other end of the line. Shiksaa had exchanged instant messages with him several times in the past. Scelson had dropped out of school after eighth grade, and it showed in his messages, which were full of misspellings and tortured syntax. But Scelson had the gift of gab and a rare trait among junk emailers: a tendency to tell the truth about his spamming tactics. So despite her revulsion for his line of work, Shiksaa found herself enjoying their online and telephone conversations.

"How would you like to see a pink contract?" Scelson asked her cheerfully that morning.

Taking its name from the color of the Hormel luncheon meat (and thus from spam), a pink contract was a tacit deal by ISPs to allow spammers to use their networks as long as too many complaints weren't generated. Scelson had previously boasted that big ISPs, despite their public posturing about opposing spam, were perfectly happy to provide services to him and other high-volume bulk emailers. Indeed, the previous June a spam fighter had reported on Nanae that a supervisor at AT&T admitted that the big company did business with spammers. But spam opponents had no hard evidence to prove the existence of such deals.

That was about to change with Scelson's offer to Shiksaa. He said he had a copy of a pink contract signed in February between AT&T and Nevada Hosting, a Delaware company run by one of Scelson's partners in spam. The contract would show, he promised, that AT&T was aware that Nevada Hosting would be providing web sites to spammers and that AT&T had agreed to look the other way.

Shiksaa was wary of Scelson's generosity and suspected there were strings attached. The previous April he had tried to blackmail anti-spammers into leaving him alone. If antis didn't back off, he threatened, he would give away his custom-made mailing program to other spammers for free. He claimed the program was able to squeeze messages past filters at AOL and pump spam out onto the Internet at the rate of eight million messages per hour.

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Mad Pierre's Homage to Shiksaa

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One day after news broke of the PSINet pink contract, Shiksaa's not-so-secret admirer Mad Pierre posted a detailed spammer exposé on Nanae. The report represented the culmination of several days of work he had poured into researching a particularly persistent and cocky junk emailer. In some respects, it was Mad Pierre's homage to the consummate anti-spam researcher, Shiksaa. The dossier even cited some of the sleuthing groundwork she had previously laid.

Ordinarily, such an exposé would have spawned a long thread of discussion. But few spam fighters, Shiksaa included, paid much attention to his little opus at the time. They were still up in arms over the shady ISP deals and were busy congratulating Shiksaa for her role in exposing them. (Mad Pierre had showered her with his customary praise as well, exclaiming on IRC that she made him behave "like a testosteronal teenager in an AOL chat room"—a line that Shiksaa was quick to appropriate for use in her Usenet signature.)

Mad Pierre knew that the subject of his early-November exposé was just a penny-ante chickenboner compared to big-time Rokso spammers such as Scelson. But Mad Pierre felt someone in Nanae should focus on the brazen bulker who had been boasting, "I'm a college dropout. I work about two hours a day. I'm ambitious, but extremely lazy, and I make over $350,000 a year. Are you curious yet?"

"Well, I got curious," wrote Mad Pierre in his report.

The spammer proclaimed that his twenty-dollar CD not only included spamming software but could also enable Internet users to find confidential information on anyone in thirty minutes or less.

"I decided I couldn't wait that long," Mad Pierre wrote. Like other spam fighters before him, he began reviewing the registration information for PrivacyBuff.com and other domains mentioned in ads from QuikSilver Enterprises. But unlike even the incomparable Shiksaa, Mad Pierre laboriously did Internet searches on the various names and addresses listed in the registrations. After trying unproductive searches on James Kincaid, Winston Cross, and other aliases, Mad Pierre plugged the name "Davis Hawke"—the registrant of QuikSilver's resalepalace.com—into a search engine.

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Chapter 5: Chapter 5

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There's no Guinness world record yet for the greatest number of spams received in a two-day period. But Karen Hoffmann would surely be a contender. A self-proclaimed soccer mom from the suburbs of Toledo, Ohio, Hoffmann was inundated with over 100,000 junk emails over the course of forty-eight hours in January 2001.

The messages advertised a multilevel marketing program run by an outfit called the Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP). At the height of the spam attack, ads bearing the subject line "Be Your Own Boss" flowed into her email server at the rate of over thirty per minute. Hoffmann tried to keep her head above water by quickly downloading and deleting the messages. But she unavoidably fell behind, and before long the volume of spam overwhelmed her account's storage capacity. Hoffmann's ISP disconnected its mail server to weather the flood.

Prior to the incident, the 41-year-old Hoffmann had never paid much attention to junk email. She had been operating Toledo CyberCafe, her web-page design business, from her home since 1996. A computer science major in college, Hoffmann had started the small company after the collapsing savings-and-loan industry took with it her career as a systems analyst for banks. She had openly published her email address on the web sites she designed for clients, so Hoffmann was accustomed to deleting a couple dozen spams each day. But the onslaught that winter suddenly turned her into a vehement anti-spammer. She wanted to know who was responsible, and she wanted the criminals to pay.

For several days following the attacks, Hoffmann was unable to concentrate on real work for clients. While her son was at high school and her husband was at his office in Toledo, she cleaned up after the spam avalanche. After doing a bit of research, Hoffmann learned that she was the victim of a dictionary attack. The spammer's mailing program had latched onto her toledocybercafe.com domain and fired off thousands of messages to nonexistent accounts, such as Dominiquex@toledocybercafe.com, Jl@toledocybercafe.com, and ashiab@toledocybercafe.com

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Tracking Empire Towers

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There's no Guinness world record yet for the greatest number of spams received in a two-day period. But Karen Hoffmann would surely be a contender. A self-proclaimed soccer mom from the suburbs of Toledo, Ohio, Hoffmann was inundated with over 100,000 junk emails over the course of forty-eight hours in January 2001.

The messages advertised a multilevel marketing program run by an outfit called the Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP). At the height of the spam attack, ads bearing the subject line "Be Your Own Boss" flowed into her email server at the rate of over thirty per minute. Hoffmann tried to keep her head above water by quickly downloading and deleting the messages. But she unavoidably fell behind, and before long the volume of spam overwhelmed her account's storage capacity. Hoffmann's ISP disconnected its mail server to weather the flood.

Prior to the incident, the 41-year-old Hoffmann had never paid much attention to junk email. She had been operating Toledo CyberCafe, her web-page design business, from her home since 1996. A computer science major in college, Hoffmann had started the small company after the collapsing savings-and-loan industry took with it her career as a systems analyst for banks. She had openly published her email address on the web sites she designed for clients, so Hoffmann was accustomed to deleting a couple dozen spams each day. But the onslaught that winter suddenly turned her into a vehement anti-spammer. She wanted to know who was responsible, and she wanted the criminals to pay.

For several days following the attacks, Hoffmann was unable to concentrate on real work for clients. While her son was at high school and her husband was at his office in Toledo, she cleaned up after the spam avalanche. After doing a bit of research, Hoffmann learned that she was the victim of a dictionary attack. The spammer's mailing program had latched onto her toledocybercafe.com domain and fired off thousands of messages to nonexistent accounts, such as Dominiquex@toledocybercafe.com, Jl@toledocybercafe.com, and ashiab@toledocybercafe.com. The technique might have made sense against a big ISP such as AOL or EarthLink, but Hoffmann had fewer than a half-dozen active email accounts using her domain. The spam attack was so damaging because her ISP had configured the domain's mail settings with a catch-all feature so that it accepted and forwarded to her main account any message sent to a toledocybercafe.com address.

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Terri TickleTerri Tickle

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Just as Hoffmann was launching her Empire Towers page in April 2001, an anti-spammer who called himself Rob Mitchell was putting the crowning touches on a spammer-tracking web site he had been building for three years.

Mitchell was also considered obsessive by some Nanae participants for his painstaking research into the subject of his site: a chronic spammer who used the online nickname "Terri DiSisto" and claimed to be a female college student in Massachusetts.

Unlike most junk emailers, DiSisto wasn't littering the Internet in hopes of selling something. Instead, her ads offered payment in the form of cash and computer or audio equipment to young men between eighteen and twenty-three who mailed her videos of themselves being tickled.

DiSisto's bizarre story began around 1996, when she started spamming obscure newsgroups including alt.sex.fetish.tickling with her ads. "No sex or nudity are ever wanted in my videos," stated the spams. "I just want to see guys tied up and mercilessly, relentlessly TICKLED!" DiSisto claimed she enjoyed tickling as a hobby and was not interested in real-life encounters with her video subjects.

"I have a boyfriend, full cadre of friends, and plenty of guys to tickle already. I AM NOT LOOKING TO MEET OR TICKLE ANY GUYS ENCOUNTERED FROM CYBERSPACE!" stated the ads. College-aged men who stepped up to the offer were told to send the finished products to post office boxes in New York or Massachusetts and were given elaborate instructions on how to produce the videos.

"When laughter begins, the tickler must ask the question, 'How ticklish are you here?'" explained DiSisto's instructions. "The tickled guy—while still being tickled—must respond in as much of a complete sentence or sentences as possible (e.g., avoiding responses like 'very' or 'not too much' in favor of 'I'm totally ticklish under my arms...'). No one- or two-word answers."

DiSisto also detailed her offer, as well as excerpts from videos and audiotapes she had received, at her web site, tickling.com. The site featured a photograph of an attractive young blonde woman, purportedly DiSisto, in an over-the-shoulder, yearbook pose.

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Hawke Rips Off Dr. Fatburn

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In their battles against junk emailers, anti-spammers constantly remind themselves of a bit of folklore known as "The Three Rules of Spam":

In January of 2001, Davis Hawke got a rude introduction to Rule #3. He had accidentally left a sensitive file exposed at one of his web sites. When Shiksaa stumbled upon it and announced her discovery on Nanae, a fellow anti-spammer cried out, "Rule number three shining bright!"

Shiksaa had been poking around at CompuZoneUSA.com after someone on Nanae called attention to Hawke's Spam Book ads, which included a link to the site. Shiksaa had taken to referring to Hawke on Nanae as "that neo-Nazi idiot" or "the creep Mad Pierre exposed." So she was pleased to discover Hawke's server had been improperly configured and allowed any Web surfer to view files not intended for the public. (She had used the same trick two years before to find unprotected customer order logs at a site run by computer seller and convicted stock manipulator Glenn Conley.)

Shiksaa didn't uncover any order logs at CompuZoneUSA.com, but she did stumble across something known as a file transfer protocol (FTP) log. It included a list of over two dozen web sites operated by Hawke, most of them previously unknown even to anti-spammers such as Mad Pierre, who had been tracking Hawke closely.

Hawke wasn't the first spammer to fall victim in that way to Rule #3. In the past, the discovery of FTP logs had helped anti-spammers notify ISPs that they had a chronic spammer in their midst. And this time was no different. An anti-spammer volunteered to report all of the sites on Hawke's FTP log. A few days later, he proudly announced "Nuked and paved!" after the ISP hosting CompuZoneUSA.com shut down the site.

It wouldn't be the last time Hawke was susceptible to dangerous lapses in his site security. But on this occasion, he was able to shrug it off without major damage. Following some downtime, he lined up new ISPs to host his sites. Soon, the refurbished CompuZoneUSA.com would become the online storefront for his newest spamming endeavor: androstenone pheromone concentrate.

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David D'Amato, the Titanic Spammer

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In early 2001, anti-spammer Rob Mitchell continued to watch tickling fetishist and spammer Terri DiSisto's online activities out of the corner of his eye. When he did mention DiSisto, he referred to him as "Terrance." But Mitchell had almost given up hope that the law would ever catch up to the strange spammer.

Then, in March of 2001, Mitchell got a phone call from Reader's Digest reporter Hal Karp. The reporter told him that federal prosecutors in Massachusetts had quietly announced a plea agreement with David P. D'Amato, a guidance counselor and assistant principal at West Hempstead High School on Long Island.

The 39-year-old D'Amato had pled guilty to misdemeanor charges of email bombing computers at Suffolk University in Boston and James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The U.S. Attorney's press release didn't mention D'Amato's Terri DiSisto persona or the spams for videos. But Karp assured Mitchell the feds had found their man and said D'Amato was facing up to a year in prison and fines of over $100,000 on each count, with sentencing scheduled for July.

Mitchell surfed to the West Hempstead High web site. There, at the top of the home page, was D'Amato's name. As an educator himself, Mitchell was aghast at the thought of a sadistic spammer and online harasser like D'Amato working in schools most of his adult life.

"Such a person should never be in charge of children in any capacity ever again," wrote Mitchell at his Project Iceberg site.

Newsday, a daily paper serving the greater New York metropolitan area, was among the first to publish a photograph of D'Amato. Taken from the West Hempstead High yearbook, the photo showed the plump, unsmiling assistant principal seated in his office. D'Amato's balding pate and jowls made him look older than his years.

"Ewwww. He looks like Truman Capote," was Shiksaa's response after Mitchell posted a link to the photograph on Nanae.

Karen Hoffmann chimed in as well when she saw the photo: "MY GOD, could he have been any uglier?"

Another anti-spammer used the image to create a parody playbill for the movie Titanic, which Shiksaa posted at her site Chickenboner.com. It showed D'Amato's head, juxtaposed with the female image of Terri DiSisto above the luxury ocean liner. Superimposed over the ship were the words "Titanic Spammer" and "A Rob Mitchell Film."

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Chapter 6: Chapter 6

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Although she appreciated the sentiment, Shiksaa wasn't entirely comfortable with being called an anti-spam goddess. She knew that long before she received her first junk email message, several other women had already distinguished themselves as elite anti-spam activists. Among the established luminaries was Kelly Molloy Thompson, a Washington State resident who for several years had been the public face of spam fighting and was quoted widely in press reports on the topic.

But in the late summer of 2001, during a seismic shift in the world of spammer block lists, Thompson did something that would force Shiksaa and other junk email opponents to rethink Thompson's place in the anti-spam pantheon.

As early as 1998, with her round face, coiffed hair, and perky smile, Thompson came across more like a kindergarten teacher than an anti-spam fanatic. That made her the perfect spokesperson for the handful of spam busters who decided to picket a Seattle car dealer in May 1998. Led by the 31-year-old Thompson, the protestors stood outside Aurora Nissan on a busy suburban Seattle street. They held up hand-lettered signs to passing motorists, decrying the car dealer's use of a contract spammer to send unsolicited email ads to thousands of Seattle Internet users.

Thanks to some savvy advance PR work by Thompson, the unusual protest was covered by the national media, which quoted her on the evils of spam, and eventually resulted in a public apology from the dealer. The event also garnered lots of attention for an anti-spam group Thompson helped found earlier that year: the Forum for Responsible and Ethical Email (FREE).

Thompson's organizing abilities were showcased again in 1999, when FREE picketed Internet multimedia software developer Real Networks. The Seattle company had drawn criticism from anti-spammers for sending email advertisements to anyone who downloaded its media player software. FREE argued that responsible email marketers send their ads only to Internet users who have expressly confirmed their interest in receiving them. After Real Networks stubbornly persisted, the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) placed the company on its spammer blacklist. When that failed to change Real's practices, Thompson and a dozen or so other protestors staged a protest across the street from Real's headquarters in a downtown Seattle high-rise tower.

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Nanae Battles over Block Lists

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Although she appreciated the sentiment, Shiksaa wasn't entirely comfortable with being called an anti-spam goddess. She knew that long before she received her first junk email message, several other women had already distinguished themselves as elite anti-spam activists. Among the established luminaries was Kelly Molloy Thompson, a Washington State resident who for several years had been the public face of spam fighting and was quoted widely in press reports on the topic.

But in the late summer of 2001, during a seismic shift in the world of spammer block lists, Thompson did something that would force Shiksaa and other junk email opponents to rethink Thompson's place in the anti-spam pantheon.

As early as 1998, with her round face, coiffed hair, and perky smile, Thompson came across more like a kindergarten teacher than an anti-spam fanatic. That made her the perfect spokesperson for the handful of spam busters who decided to picket a Seattle car dealer in May 1998. Led by the 31-year-old Thompson, the protestors stood outside Aurora Nissan on a busy suburban Seattle street. They held up hand-lettered signs to passing motorists, decrying the car dealer's use of a contract spammer to send unsolicited email ads to thousands of Seattle Internet users.

Thanks to some savvy advance PR work by Thompson, the unusual protest was covered by the national media, which quoted her on the evils of spam, and eventually resulted in a public apology from the dealer. The event also garnered lots of attention for an anti-spam group Thompson helped found earlier that year: t