Yesterday a Federal District Court in Alexandria, Virginia handed down thirteen indictments against Anonymous hackers for a series of website attacks in late 2010. In yet another example of journalistic malpractice, today hate blogger R.S. McCain suggests that it was all the work of Neal Rauhauser and Brett Kimberlin, despite the fact that neither person is named in the indictments.
Once you understand that it was the criminal “Operation Payback” hackings that led Hunton & Williams’s clients to seek the assistance of HB Gary Federal (of which Aaron Barr was CEO) to help protect their clients against such illegal activity, you see that both Brett Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution and Neal Rauhauser were on the side of these criminal hackers.
We have to wonder: is McCain looking to add a whole new defamation charge to the lawsuit he already faces by accusing two unindicted persons of taking part in a criminal conspiracy without proof? As we have said before, McCain and his friends actually believe their crazy notion that Kimberlin runs an international hacker ring through Rauhauser on behalf of Islamic terrorists. This would be delightful as a Tom Clancy novel, but as “journalism” it fails a basic sniff-test.
Let us recap the actual history here. After Anonymous attacked the websites of financial institutions that had cut off WikiLeaks from receiving contributions, HBGary Federal CEO (and friend of Andrew Breitbart) Aaron Barr bragged openly that he would reveal the “leadership” of Anonymous, a leaderless collective, and then got smacked around for being a tool who could not even secure his own company’s emails. The FBI made its arrests in that case more than a year ago, arresting neither Kimberlin nor Rauhauser or even naming them in any way.
McCain has connected two very different dots here, turning Kimberlin’s outspoken political support for the stated transparency mission of WikiLeaks into sinister control of Anonymous. McCain’s only “proof” is this lunatic screed by Jennifer Emick, McCain’s favorite source of information on all things Anonymous and all things Neal Rauhauser, which pigeonholes every obscure blogger who ever gave Seth Allen butthurt into a massive conspiracy. Remember how the schizophrenic Mr. Allen lost a libel case to Kimberlin? Remember how Aaron Walker Stalker inserted himself into that case, embarking on his years-long legal crusade against Kimberlin? Remember how that “lawfare” campaign climaxed this Summer with Walker Stalker suborning perjury from Tetyana Kimberlin? Good times, but all forgotten by Mr. McCain in a desperate bid to indict his enemies in blog court:
If you ask around, you’ll find that a lot of people suspect that the FBI “protects” Neal Rauhauser because he is a confidential informant.
This is the same line that McCain used against Barrett Brown, but leave that aside. How does McCain propose that Rauhauser would be both a criminal leader of Anonymous AND an FBI snitch? Which is it? And when McCain says “a lot of people,” does he really mean Jennifer Emick and the mysterious Michelle @ZAPEM whose ridiculous “Twittergate” smears of Rauhauser first got aired in McCain’s blog? We think so. These are people who spend much of their time trying to report Mr. Rauhauser to the FBI for imaginary crimes, then wonder aloud why the Bureau does not act on their loony fake reports. When they call Rauhauser a confidential informant, they are merely resolving their own cognitive dissonance. That is, they are explaining the Bureau’s lack of action to themselves in a way that saves their egos by not requiring them to admit they are full of beans.
What did @NealRauhauser know about "Operation Payback" and when did he know it? Kinda relevant today, eh? #Anonymous
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 4, 2013
We can answer McCain’s question: Rauhauser knew about “Operation Payback” when he read about it in the news. Whether or not this is “relevant today” depends entirely on whether you want to believe McCain’s dissonant conspiracy theories about Kimberlin and Rauhauser. If you are the kind of person who demands actual proof, then it is not relevant at all. It is just Robert Stacy McCain linkbaiting again.