FOUR
Operation Roll RedRoll
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“This disclosure is about the truth. This disclosure is about setting examples. If you lie, if you are corrupt, if you commit wrong doing - you will be found out. It will be revealed, and justice will be served.”
~~ LocalLeaks
Sunday - December 23, 2012 approx. 11:00 AM ET - "Safe House" Fredericton, New Brunswick - CANADA
On August 22, 2012 two members of the Big Red High School football team in Steubenville, Ohio - USA were arrested and charged with the rape and kidnapping of an out of town 16 year old girl that took place on August 11th. At the time of this gang rape, the girl was intoxicated and unconscious. The victim had been intentionally drugged with a "date rape" intoxicant. She was photographed and video was taken of her in this condition, and there is evidence that she was hauled in a comatose state to multiple parties - and almost certainly raped by more members of the local high school football and wrestling team than just the two players who currently stand charged. There is even evidence that she was urinated upon during this hideous assault. Despite all this, it looked as though a town rife with corruption, cronyism, illegal gambling and fixated upon their star high school football team (a major economic revenue engine) were prepared to orchestrate a major cover-up in order to sweep the entire affair under the rug. As this chapter will document, this cover-up was perpetrated by people in the high school administration, local government and law enforcement.
A cell within Anonymous called Knight Security took up the cause of giving a voice to the victim of this horrible crime, and began unraveling this conspiracy of silence designed to protect a group of these high school football players who had become well known to their fellow students as "The Rape Crew". Fueled by intelligence they had received from many students at Big Red High School, they launched Anonymous Operation Roll RedRoll by releasing a press release and video. Take careful note of the various screen capture images of pictures taken by these monsters of this poor defenseless girl, and note their many comments made in tweets and Facebook posts regarding their crime (now since deleted). The Op was immediately and heatedly controversial within Anonymous USA, and by late morning this individual and his Crew Knight Security were taking heat from some fairly heavy hitting and influential Anons. The founder and leader of Knight Security was a hacktivist called KYAnonymous.
KYanon and I had bumped into each other here and there in Anonymous circles, and I was impressed with his zeal. He and his Crew had taken a special liking to going up against rape culture in the USA, and so it didn't surprise me when the uproar began and I found him and his Crew neck deep in the middle of the mess. And the mess already had a name, Anonymous Operation Roll RedRoll. OpNoPro and I watched with mild amusement as KYanonymous got knocked about in the twitter Time Lines for starting an Op not everyone agreed with. As I said some fairly influential Anons were nay sayers apparently. Finally I told OpNoPro I was thinking of intervening on KYanon's behalf, and he concurred. We both liked the cause of standing up for this poor girl and maybe bringing this rape gang to justice. And neither of us had anything but positive interactions with either KYanonymous or his Crew Knight Sec. I flipped open a Twitter DM tab and pinged him.
@CommanderXanon: Hey, what's up? I was wondering if maybe you'd like a hand. Me and my Crew like your Op, and I'm willing to stand up publicly and get your back if you want.
@KYAnonymous: Wow, honored X. I'll take any help I can get at this point. You're a legend man, if you stand up many will listen to you.
@CommanderXanon: Well, I don't know about the legend part. And I have my own fairly dedicated cadre of haters, that might actually be a downside for you to consider. But sure, me and my Crew are in. Consider us a part of the Op. But it's your Op KY, I'm not running this. You started it and you finish it, understood?
@KYAnonymous: Got it, and thanks. Any immediate suggestions?
@CommanderXanon: Yes. The rally today was weak. Get Occupy Steubenville involved, I researched them and for a small town it's a decently organized Occupy. And make sure to bring a bullhorn, a sound system, and batteries for both next time. Line up speakers in advance via social media. Finally, check out a little something I am involved in called "LocalLeaks" at www.LocalLeaks.ml I think that will be helpful tool for you moving forward. Begin making your Crew and the world aware of the site on social media. Let's see if we can't at least get enough info leaked that we can get a rough outline of how this coverup was engineered.
@KYAnonymous: Making notes now X, we'll do it. I can't thank you enough for this, it means a lot.
@CommanderXanon: Let's just stay focused on what success is here, let's find out what happened to this girl and who did it. Then get them in front of a jury.
@KYAnonymous: I have a feeling we'll have the information we need shortly.
@CommanderXanon: Indeed. Well that sure will make things interesting. Let me ask you, any word from the girl or her family since you let drop the Press Release and video for the Op?
@KYAnonymous: Strictly between you and me? Yes. They are happy for the help, these boys are ready to straight up skate for what they did to their daughter. The small town system is rigged around industrial grade high school football.
@CommanderXanon: Ok then, try and get it a little tighter for tomorrow. I'll send out your PR and video to the Anonymous Media List. Let's both push the idea of LocalLeaks and see if we can get someone to dump some goodies on us.
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Wednesday - December 26, 2012 approx. 7:30 AM ET - "Safe House" Fredericton, New Brunswick - CANADA
The daily protests, in driving snowstorms no less - were growing constantly. What started as dozens huddled together on the Steubenville Courthouse steps had now become several hundred, and tomorrow's protest held the possibility of a couple of thousand. That was a lot for a small town of only fifty thousand or so. As I suggested, KYAnonymous had brought in Occupy Steubenville to help with the organization on the ground so that he and his Crew Knight Security could concentrate more on the cyber aspects of what we wanted to achieve.
I am actually the Editor In Chief of LocalLeaks, This morning when I opened up the submissions box at LocalLeaks, I found we had a submission! A leak! At the beginning of Anonymous Operation Roll RedRoll the lead Crew Knight Security had hacked a Steubenville High football fan website and its servers because it was rumored that its owner was deeply involved in the corruption surrounding this lucrative high school football franchise. Initially there had been a deface of the front page, but apparently files were also taken because once I unpacked the leak from the submissions box I found the entire E-Mail spool of the website owner. So I spent the day building the now infamous "The Steubenville Files" at LocalLeaks, and blasting a PR announcing the new section and the inaugural leak. Within hours, the main stream media had made the Steubenville Files a viral sensation - and the floodgates opened up.
The leaks began trickling in just after Noon, and by evening we were receiving several dozen an hour. This level of leaks into the LocalLeaks submission box would continue for weeks. I could literally just keep hitting the refresh button and there were new submissions. Clearly this was a city dying to liberate itself from serious endemic corruption, and we had given them the only viable opportunity to come along so far. But something was happening that went beyond Steubenville. LocalLeaks had had a few minor disclosures, but the platform had struggled to find support and an audience. Not only was all that clearly changing, but we were now making disclosure history, for surely no disclosure platform, not even WikiLeaks, had ever received this many discrete leaks from individual sources in such a short space of time.
As evening approached I turned to OpNoPro for advice. We had printed out the most tantalizing and informative of the leaks, we had piles of them laying all over the table and desk. The sources were all over the place, from local law enforcement to people living in the Sheriff's own household. And clearly there was a pattern here, but how to see it? How could we string all this disparate data into a coherent theory that would prove a cover-up in Steubenville? I searched for data analysis software and there were some programs that might be helpful, but they cost a fortune. But when I saw the screen shots it gave me an idea. Grabbing a twenty off OpNoPro I hit the store and bought colored string, tacks, and scissors.
Returning to the apartment, I proceeded to walk around OpNoPro's living room, tacking leaks to the wall in what at first appeared to be a random pattern. But when I started thoughtfully applying different colored string, OpNoPro, who was watching my work intently, began to nod in understanding.
I had not chosen the string colors randomly. Green was for money, red for violence, purple for gambling or drugs. I worked for hours, long into the night. Leaks continued to pour in and OpNoPro would print and sort them for me. By dawn we could begin to see the outline of how a young girl could be gang raped by six boys in front of dozens of witnesses (even taking pictures and sharing them on their mobile devices) and not be charged with anything. I spent the next week puzzling over OpNoPro's living room walls, printing and adding new leaks to the collage, and then updating the Steubenville Files on the LocalLeaks website as we gained new insights into what really happened to Jane Doe, who did it, and who was protecting them.
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Thursday - January 3, 2013 approx. 7:30 AM ET - "Safe House" Fredericton, New Brunswick - CANADA
I was going through the submission box, trying to see if anything earth shattering had been leaked during the night regarding Steubenville. The third one I opened made me spill my coffee all over OpNoPro's carpet. It was the single biggest leak ever for LocalLeaks, I knew this within ten seconds. And even then as I watched the video a second time unable to believe we had this, I knew it was a game changer not only for the Op, but for my disclosure platform as well.
It was a video. Clearly one of the boys we had identified as a member of the infamous Steubenville "Rape Crew" had his phone, or more likely the cloud storage attached to it, hacked. The entire nauseating video was of one Michael Colin Nodianos a Steubenville High student who we had identified as not only a member of the "Rape Crew", but one of the actual attackers. The video was shot in the basement of one of the boys, while the attack on Jane Doe was still ongoing. It shows Nodianos in a basement (with a rifle nearby) as he brags about being one of the rapists, and described how Jane Doe is actually still there, naked outside on the lawn, and how they had just peed on her. The video goes on for a long time, and is so difficult to watch that we released it with a viewer warning attached.
After watching it twice I showed it to OpNoPro. We both realized that we were about to seize the western news cycle, and turn Steubenville, already a hot bed, inside out. This was going to change everything. As I rushed to cook us both a good breakfast and brewed a gallon of coffee, myself and OpNoPro discussed how best to proceed with this disclosure. As we feasted and talked, we planned out the release for the Noon news cycle. That didn't leave much time for details like the press release, but this video wasn't going to need a lot of supporting material in order to have an impact. The impact would be immediate, and devastating.
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Saturday - January 7, 2013 approx. 8:00 AM ET - "Safe House" Fredericton, New Brunswick - CANADA
This morning found me working frantically with the production crew of Democracy Now! hosted by the epic Amy Goodman. This would be my second appearance on DN! and I was just as nervous as the first time. Amy Goodman was not only a pre-eminent and award winning journalist, but she was an icon and one of the founders and innovators of the independent media movement which many people in information activism simply take for granted today. The technical requirements for me to safely do television given my situation are daunting to say the least. It's why I do so few of these sorts of interviews. Finally, we got it right and I was able to send a stable and encrypted video signal to the studio of Democracy Now!
I was then summarily banished to the virtual "green room" to listen to the other guests and await my turn to be on the show. After some time passed, Amy rolled with my intro and I flipped the switch on my mic to talk to the world about Anonymous Operation Roll RedRoll.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to the hacktivist from Anonymous, to "X," a pseudonym for security reasons. Can you tell us what it is that you did, that your group did?
"X": Hi, Amy. Thanks for having me on today. I think, to begin with, it’s important to understand that this action involved three separate entities that are overlapping and coordinated, but separate. The cyber-action, which involved the hacking and the various other cyber-aspects, were conducted by Anonymous in a very specific cell within Anonymous known as KnightSec. And then the ground protests, which were - took place on two Saturdays in a row—this last Saturday and the one before - were handled by Occupy Steubenville, so that was their responsibility. And then the third sort of part of the puzzle was the Local Leaks, which is the disclosure platform that we have, which released a great - just a copious amount of information on this case. And so, it’s important to understand that those three elements were involved.
AMY GOODMAN: I just want to say, especially for radio listeners who cannot see, that you’re wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, and your head is covered. Your voice is masked, as well as your name. Why are you doing this anonymously?
"X": For security purposes. Actually, I’ve been on your show before. The last time I was on the air, I was still anonymous with a small "a," and I was apprehended shortly after I appeared on your show last time by the FBI. And for a number of reasons, because I felt that the prosecution was political against myself, I chose to flee into exile, and I’m in Canada now. And so, my name is actually known to most people.
You could research me and easily find out who I am. My appearance is masked because I’ve altered by appearance since I’ve gone into exile. And I’m now a fugitive, so I’ve altered my appearance. But I keep the name "X" because, to be honest with you, I kind of like it.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you get a hold—explain the video that your group, that Anonymous, that you got a hold of, that you released, what this 12-minute video showed.
"X": Well, I think it’s apparent to anybody who can stomach watching it for the entire 12 minutes. I, myself, here at our location - we’ve been working night and day on this operation, and I’ve watched it at least a dozen times, and it makes me sick each time we watch it. I think it speaks for itself. These young men were sitting around immediately after the crime took place - that’s clear from what they say in the video. One person even gets up at one point and leaves in disgust and goes to check on the victim to see if the victim is OK. So the victim is still nearby, still - the crime is still in progress, in essence, when this video was shot. And a number of people are implicated in the video, including the subject of the video; Michael Nodianos implicates himself in this crime. So I think the video speaks for itself. And, you know, I can’t imagine how the police do not see this as further evidence and do not levy charges against the people in the video.
AMY GOODMAN: What are you, Monika, calling for right now? Right now, two young people have been charged. There is a lot of community support for the football players. Wasn’t there reference in the video to Duke and the lacrosse players?
MONIKA JOHNSON HOSTLER: There was. And very much so, like "X" said, I had to actually watch the 12-minute video in increments, because it was sickening to my stomach to hear men, especially of this age, talk about how dead she was. And one of them, I think, even alluded to, if this was your daughter or your wife in 10 years, you wouldn’t be saying this, and he said, "Yes, I would."
So, for me, especially as a parent, not just as an advocate, it is sickening to hear the degree of which they go on and carry on about how much she was raped. And so, the correlation to Duke was, she was raped more than the Duke lacrosse players raped.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, what do you -
MONIKA JOHNSON HOSTLER: And so, what we are calling - what we are calling for is not just how this is handled in Steubenville, Ohio, but really asking America to take a hard look at ourselves in how we are - handle sexual violence and rape in our country. I think we’ve been able to point our fingers and turn our heads to rapes that have happened in other countries and not held ourselves accountable as Americans to say that we absolutely still have a culture of rape, where women and girls are still degraded and dehumanized, and rape is in the fabric of this country. And unfortunately, I would think, centuries later, that we would be further along in terms of our response, but yet we still see Americans blaming victims. So, in terms of our overall response, we’re calling for America to take a hard look at itself and really think about the culture that we’re raising our kids in and the things that we are allowing to happen by not acknowledging, as a community, as a society, the importance of supporting the rape victim.
And I do want to go back briefly to something you asked Kristie earlier about the rape victim recalling her story or what happened. And what I’d like to point out to your listeners and viewers is, oftentimes rape victims don’t consider what happened to them rape. Just as Kristie described, in this case, she was intoxicated, inebriated, that she wasn’t able to actually recall what happened, which is often the case that we hear with drug-facilitated or alcohol-facilitated rapes. So I think it’s important for people to understand, before we begin to blame the victim, when a victim recalls their story in pieces, it is often because of cases like this where it’s difficult to recall the incidents that happen, especially when they’re intoxicated or inebriated.
AMY GOODMAN: Kristen, can you talk about the role of social media in exposing the story - first Alexandria, the blogger, then Anonymous?
KRISTEN GWYNNE: Social media has played an interesting role in the story from the beginning, because without it, just prosecuting the case at all would have been difficult because so much of the evidence was tweets and Facebook posts and videos that kids put up on YouTube. And what Alexandria Goddard did was take screen shots of everything before the kids were smart enough, I guess, to realize that they needed to delete them. So she was able to compile evidence that....
AMY GOODMAN: And who is she?
KRISTEN GWYNNE: She was a blogger, a local - for the website Prinniefied.com, and she was also from the town. So she had, I guess, a personal interest in investigating further, because she said, from the minute she heard about the case, she believed that the football players were being treated specially because the town has so much invested in the team. And then, once Anonymous caught hold of it, they took it even further by exposing more—more tweets and then, of course, the video, which was just a stunning, I guess, testament to the rape culture in America and in this town, in particular.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, "X," can you talk about OpPedoChat and talk about - well, I’m looking at Wired magazine. "It could indicate that this is the project of one subsection of Anonymous, which would explain the slightly different tone to the information release. This isn’t the first anti-paedophile project from the group, either." And then it goes on to talk about the past ones.
"X": Sure, Amy, I’ll be happy to, but I just want to point out one last thing on the Steubenville subject. There’s more to this than just a rape that’s being covered up because of football and because of legitimate revenue within that community.
We have uncovered - Anonymous has uncovered a gigantic gambling ring in Steubenville that, you know, is - probably half of the revenue in that community is underground, and it involves gambling, involves drugs. So, there’s more to this than this. This story is about corruption. It’s about a sick fascination and fixation with football. And so, I encourage people to go to LocalLeaks and look at the information that we’ve revealed, because this goes deeper than just rape.
Regarding OpPedoChat -
AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.
"X": OpPedoChat is an operation by Anonymous to uncover pedophiles on social media and to out them and to get them removed from social media and, hopefully, arrested and convicted for their crimes.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Commander X, I want to thank you for being with us, hacktivist with the group Anonymous. Also, thank you to Monika Johnson Hostler with the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, as well as to Kristen Gwynne.
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Friday - January 11, 2013 approx. 8:00 AM ET - "Safe House" Fredericton, New Brunswick - CANADA
By now the shitstorm swirling around Steubenville was in full swing. Nearly daily protests involving thousands of Mask wearing Anons, feminists, and just folks who supported Jane Doe, were tying up downtown Steubenville relentlessly. Everything from City Hall to the Sheriff's Department had been hacked so many times some of them just stopped trying to fix them.
Thanks to me and my Crew's intervention on behalf of KYAnonymous and Knight Security, Anonymous Operation Roll RedRoll was gaining global consensus and participation. But as the Editor In Chief of LocalLeaks, my faithful side-kick, OpNoPro and I had our hands full. Hundreds of seperate leaks had been submitted, with more pouring in every hour. And while OpNoPro's living room was now a mass of printed leaks and colored string, we were actually starting to see a clear picture of just exactly what was going on in Stubenville that could allow a gang rape to go unpunished.
OpNoPro and I were working on yet another daily update to the now world-famous Steubenville Files when our world came to a screeching halt as an annoncement began flooding our Twitter Time Lines and other social media.
Aaron Swartz was dead.
Aaron Swartz was a genius child-prodigy coder who among many things created Reddit and innovated RSS news feeds. All before he was old enough to vote. At five years old, Aaron wrote his first piece of software. And now, because of the exact same political persecution against Information Activists by USDOJ using the outdated and brutal CFAA that drove me from my own country, had now killed our beloved Aaron. Aaron was dead by his own hand at a mere twenty-six years old. They had hounded him for years, for simply downloading too many scientific journals which he had a right to download anyway. The FBI tormented him, his family, his girl friend and even his ex-girl friend. All simply to prove a point and strike a blow at those "free information" nut jobs. Aaron had hung himself in his apartment. And my world was unhinged.... So it wasn't enough for the USA to imprison Information Activists for decades, or to run us out of our own country. Now they were going to hound our families and us....to death.
And oh my god how they had now taken the very best of us. Kind, decent, caring, even patriotic Aaron was a saint. There was not a bad bone in his body. Dear.... that's how I would have described him. He was a dear and incredibly intelligent wonder boy. And they had driven him to his death. The slow building rage that had been building against the government of the USA for its war on Anonymous, WikiLeaks, and Information Activists, boiled over. It had gone from being simple political resolve and revolutionary zeal...to hatred. By the end of the day, and to this day - that's what Aaron's death gave me. A burning hatred of, and determination to destroy completely, the government of the USA. Never forgive, never forget....
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Sunday - January 15, 2013 approx. 8:00 AM ET - "Safe House" Fredericton, New Brunswick - CANADA
Today we would release through LocalLeaks the first draft of the final report on precisely what happened to Jane Doe on that fateful night, who did it to her - and how. OpNoPro and I had stayed up all night polishing and editing the final section of the now famous Steubenville Files. And no matter how many times I've read this report, it still breaks my heart and makes me cry.
-- What REALLY Happened That Night --
We have received an extraordinary set of particular leaks from a number of young people in Steubenville who were witness to various parts of this horrendous crime. From this material, we have been able to piece together a timeline of events on that fateful night in August 2012. During this description, we will refer to the victim as "Jane Doe".
After being convinced, with some amount of coaxing - to attend the parties that night with the "Rape Crew" by Mark Cole's girlfriend Santoro, Jane Doe was picked up at a volleyball team party she was attending in the early evening of August 11th and transported in a vehicle with Richmond, Mays and Cole in it. Jane Doe was administered a "date rape" drug snuck into her drink almost immediately, possibly while still in the vehicle en route to the night's "festivities". In any case, she has no memories after being picked up. The first party of the night was at the home of Assistant Coach Rick Cameletti, where Michael Nodianos, Charlie Keenan, Cody Saltsman, and Anthony Craig were already engaged in heavy drinking and drug use. At this location Jane Doe was raped multiple times by Richmond and Mays and at least two other assailants from the "Rape Crew". At that point the "party" went on the move. They first stopped at another Assistant Coach's home, Coach Belerdine. Both Belerdine and his sister were present at this time. Jane Doe was again sexually assaulted at this party. They hit the road again with an unconscious Jane Doe in tow. While en route to Mark Cole's house, Jane was again raped and sodomized in the back seat of a vehicle - and this was video recorded by Mark Cole who was in the front seat. Her attackers in the car were again Mays and Richmond. Once they arrived at Mark Cole's house Jane Doe was carried to the basement where she was again raped multiple times by multiple attackers, one of which was Michael Nodianos. Also at the Cole residence, Jane Doe was orally raped by Trent Mays.
Finally, having sated themselves and exhausted any further entertainment that Jane Doe could provide for these animals, she was unceremoniously dumped (still unconscious) onto the front lawn of the Cole residence - where at least one member of the "Rape Crew" proceeded to urinate on her. At some point in the early morning hours of August 12th, a still unconscious Jane Doe was transported to her home in West Virginia - where she was deposited on the front lawn of her families home. She was discovered there by her parents at dawn.
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Just after the final release of the Steubenville Files a personal thank you note from Jane Doe was quietly circulated among a few of us who had worked so hard on Anonymous Operation Roll RedRoll.
Dear Anonymous --
I wanted to thank you all from the bottom of my heart. What you did for me was priceless. By standing with me, by making me not alone anymore - you gave me back my dignity.
I feel like I am an honorary member of Anonymous. I will never forget what you did for me.
ALL MY HEART -- Jane Doe
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In short order, a Grand Jury was called into existence. There were indictments of students and coaches - many were caught up in the dragnet. Grand Juries have broad investigatory powers, and this one went into all the dark corners that LocalLeaks had shone a light into. Two of the young men that LocalLeaks had identified as having repeatedly violated Jane Doe were eventually convicted and sent to prison for a couple of years. A soft juvenile detention facility.
Things did not turn out so well for the Information Activist and hero Anon who started it all, KYAnonymous. Feeling the FBI closing in on him with their CFAA swords drawn, KYAnonymous threw down his last card. He stepped out into the stage lights and took off his Mask. And he did it, as we say in the Hacker Underground - 'like a sir'.
Due to many serious death threats and other personal security issues, he was forced to use donated funds to purchase armed security and body Guards for himself and his entourage. The event was well attended, and fairly dramatic. KYAnonymous stepped forward, pulled off his Mask - and introduced himself: "hello, my name is Deric Lostutter, and it is a relief to take off this Mask and face you".