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.

As the anti-spammers were handing out leaflets and displaying their signs (“Spam is theft!”) to passersby, a few Real Networks representatives showed up. They invited Thompson and other organizers up to the company’s offices and asked Thompson to instruct the other protestors to disperse. Thompson said they’d happily meet with company officials after the picket was over. But until then, the anti-spammers would hold their ground. At the scheduled conclusion of the protest, Thompson and two other antis rode the elevator up to Real’s twenty-ninth-floor offices. They ended up spending over three hours trying to educate the firm’s marketing executives about why spamming was actually bad for business.

Thompson’s impromptu meeting with Real Networks didn’t instantly change the company’s business practices. But it did help her land a job the following November with MAPS in Redwood City, California. As associate director, she was responsible for media relations as well as for handling negotiations with companies eager to get off MAPS’s Realtime Blackhole List (RBL).

Soon, Thompson was working sixty-hour weeks, trying to keep both spammers and anti-spammers at bay. She quickly discovered that being on the front lines at an anti-spam protest was nothing like working the phones of a blacklisting organization. Anti-spammers frequently emailed and phoned her to inquire why MAPS was slow to process nominations to the RBL. But her toughest job was informing companies that they were about to be placed on the RBL. Since many major ISPs, including America Online and Microsoft, relied on the RBL to filter their email, blacklisted companies were unable to exchange email with large swaths of the Internet. As a result, many firms facing the blacklist were hostile when Thompson gave them the word.

On one occasion, when Thompson warned the manager of a company that it was headed for the RBL, he snidely asked how many different fathers her children had. The representative of another firm about to be blacklisted inquired whether she was on welfare. Another time, Thompson informed a California ISP that it would find itself on the RBL if it continued providing service to Bulk ISP Corporation, a spam-support company. When word reached Saied Abdul R. Al-Zalzalah, the head of Bulk ISP Corp, he left an angry message on the MAPS hotline answering machine.

“You’ve caused a lot of problems for us now. I have to move the site somewhere else. That’s a lot of work for me to do,” said Al-Zalzalah. “I think you’re a bitch. I’m going to go speak with my lawyer today ... and get your site sued, you and your company, and try to get you fired.”^[1]

Al-Zalzalah never succeeded in his threats. But taking verbal abuse remained a regular part of Thompson’s workday. Some callers to the hotline even went so far as to threaten to kill Thompson. One day, as she was getting into her car after work, she noticed someone had shot a hole in the windshield.

Soon, the attacks on MAPS came from high-priced lawyers hired by large Internet firms. In 2000, several companies, including Harris Interactive, a division of the renowned polling firm, filed separate lawsuits against MAPS after being listed on the RBL. In a news report about the Harris lawsuit, the polling company’s chief executive accused MAPS of being “a group of self-appointed zealots.”

Rather than circling the wagons around MAPS, Shiksaa and other spam fighters watched the attacks with a sense of detachment. Over the years, they had grown increasingly disillusioned with the service and were often frustrated with what they considered its excessive caution and lack of communication.

But the erosion of support for MAPS accelerated in October 2000. A discussion had been underway in Nanae about how the block list could improve its effectiveness. In a moment of frustration, MAPS founder and chief executive Paul Vixie crashed the conversation.

“Fuck Nanae,” he wrote in a posting to the newsgroup, and then twisted the knife.

“I mean, a lot of you are my friends, but...your opinions about what MAPS should be doing are both generally and specifically worthless other than as conversation-starters.”

Nanae participants recoiled, giving Vixie an opportunity to soften his remarks. But instead he dug in: “You may all fight spammers if you wish. MAPS is fighting spam itself.”

The distinction was an important one to many spam opponents who believed that it was detrimental to personalize their battles with spam. But Vixie’s proclamation caused a rift among spam fighters.

Until that point, Shiksaa, like many anti-spammers, still thought of MAPS as a kind of community-based project. Technically, it was a California limited liability corporation that employed over twenty people. But MAPS relied heavily on nominations from the grass roots in building its spammer blacklist. Shiksaa also tremendously admired the dedication of Thompson and other people running the organization, and she had been prepared to contribute generously to the MAPS legal defense fund. But Shiksaa announced that she had put away her checkbook after reading Vixie’s comment, as did a number of other anti-spammers on Nanae.

MAPS nonetheless managed to weather its legal challenges. It was able to convince Harris to drop its lawsuit and switch to a “confirmed opt-in” system, under which Internet users would have to follow two explicit steps before Harris could add them to its mailing list. But the lawsuits also drained MAPS financially, and when the dot-com economy started to tank in late 2000, MAPS suffered as well. In response, the non-profit made a big announcement in mid-July of 2001. The block list service said it was discontinuing its practice of voluntary subscriptions and instead would require all large users to pay (up to $10,000 annually) for access to the RBL and other MAPS services.

“MAPS’ purpose is to stop spam on the Internet. That purpose can only be achieved as long as MAPS can maintain itself as a corporation...MAPS can simply no longer afford to foot the bill for the bulk of the Internet community,” said Margie Arbon, MAPS business development manager, in a posting to Nanae about the policy changes. Going forward, MAPS would allow free access to its data only “under limited circumstances” she said.^[2]

Despite the stress, Kelly Thompson loved her stint at MAPS; and she loved making a difference in the spam fight. But two weeks after the big subscription announcement, Thompson posted a note of her own on Nanae: she had resigned her position and was looking for work.

Thompson didn’t explain why she was leaving, but it was obvious to Shiksaa. MAPS had become increasingly impotent over the years, and its switch to a fee-based system was just the final death knell. In making the decision to go purely commercial, MAPS would lose the goodwill of many volunteers such as Shiksaa, who for years had felt that MAPS treated them with indifference.

The MAPS announcement set in motion other important changes in the anti-spamming world. In August, a new spam blacklist quietly appeared on the Internet. In many ways, it was the antithesis of MAPS. Calling itself the Spam Prevention Early Warning System, or Spews, the new blacklist could be downloaded for free by anyone. The operators of Spews were anonymous. (The registration record for the site, Spews.org, listed an address in the Russian Federation of Irkutsk, but most people on Nanae assumed that was a joke.)

Unlike MAPS, Spews was not interested in receiving nominations to its block list. “Think of it as one group’s Consumer Reports review of portions of the billions of Internet addresses,” said a notice at the site. In fact, there was no way to communicate directly with Spews. The operators simply instructed individuals to leave messages for them on Nanae.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Spews and MAPS was the ruthlessness with which Spews attacked spam. MAPS usually tried to educate companies about how to avoid being blacklisted, whereas the operators of Spews appeared to have a “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality about hard-core spammers. They never shied away from causing collateral damage and sometimes placed all of an Internet service provider’s network addresses on the Spews list, even if spammers were using only a small portion.

Yet the renegade new service continued to attract supporters, with significant numbers of mail server operators using the block list to protect their users from spam. With its higher public profile, Spews became the subject of intense speculation about who was running the show.

One Nanae reader noted that the design of the Spews site was strikingly similar to one used by Xoasis.com, a free web-hosting service run by a Seattle ISP. A Nanae regular named Gary reported receiving a phone call from someone representing himself as one of the principals of Spews. The caller had revealed that Spews was run by seven people, each of whom was a system administrator at a large company. But the caller hadn’t revealed his name or those of the other Spews principals.

“I suspect any attempt to back track Spews is going to run into brick walls, dead ends, land mines, booby traps...I suspect that a LOT of thought went into this,” wrote Gary.

While many anti-spammers admired Spews for its boldness, Thompson found the blacklist’s secrecy offensive.

“I signed my name to every single thing I did at MAPS. I took the phone calls, I answered the email, and I didn’t hide,” she wrote in a note to Nanae. “People know who I am, and they can decide whether to trust me or not. I owned my work. If they don’t have the guts to own their work, then I don’t care to consider their opinion.”

Thompson also resented Spews’s decision to use Nanae as its support forum. Why should the newsgroup have to be polluted with irate postings from companies blacklisted by Spews?

Among those who defended Spews was Steve Linford, operator of Spamhaus.org. Linford said he was saddened by the way some anti-spammers had greeted the new blacklist. He noted that since Spews went live, it had already caused several recalcitrant ISPs to give the boot to longtime junk emailers on their networks. Many of those same spammers had also been listed in the Spamhaus Register of Known Spam Operations (Rokso), which had grown from just twenty-four firms in 2000 to over sixty by August of 2001.

“There are suddenly a lot of homeless spammers” thanks to Spews, noted Linford. Then, in a comment directed at Thompson, Linford defended the decision by Spews’s operators to remain anonymous. As he saw it, Spews was hoping to avoid the same fate as MAPS.

“The MAPS ex-staffers here know better than anyone how many people contacted you every day asking and demanding replies, wanting every ISP black holed now, sending you spam after spam, carbon-copying you on everything, not to mention the amount of spammers calling you trying to wangle off your list,” wrote Linford.

As he justified why Spews operated as it did, Linford might just as well have been describing the pressures he felt as the not-anonymous operator of Spamhaus.

“They don’t want their personal details, addresses and phone numbers known to every spammer and every lawyer in town. They’re in the front line, right in the thick of it, finding out who’s making the connection with whom, which spambag is about to set up on which Costa Rica ISP, who’s just agreed to provide haven for whom, etc. That’s what it’s all about,” he wrote. Linford concluded with a plea for spam fighters to give Spews a chance to correct any systemic flaws.

Thompson decided to withhold further public judgment on Spews. But she felt Linford’s message deserved a response. Despite their efforts to insulate themselves from criticism, she warned, the people behind Spews were sure to have some rocky days ahead.

“If the Spews folks want to do this, they had better be prepared. Because...it will never, NEVER be any easier than this. It only gets harder.”

Thompson’s words struck some anti-spammers merely as sour grapes. But her prediction would prove painfully true. In the years ahead, the desperate efforts by spammers to unmask Spews would eventually roil the lives of several Nanae leaders, including Shiksaa and Linford.

But at the time, September 2001, it was Thompson’s life that was about to take a dramatic new turn. No one would read about it in Nanae for months, but she had quietly started working for Mindshare Design, a California company that operated a bulk-emailing service called PostMaster General.

When Thompson accepted the position as Mindshare’s Standards and Practices Manager, she was well aware that PostMaster General was frequently abused by junk emailers and derided on Nanae as a spam foundry. She realized that many anti-spammers, had they known of her plans, would have scorned her for selling out, for crossing over to the dark side. But Thompson didn’t view her decision that way. Instead, she saw herself going to fight spam from the inside.

After nearly two years of nonstop spamming, Davis Hawke finally started to make some serious money in the summer of 2001. Instead of earning a couple hundred dollars per week, Hawke suddenly measured his cash flow in the thousands as he racked up orders for Power Diet Plus. And it wasn’t as if he was working any harder. In fact, Hawke had discovered that business operated most smoothly when he sent out spams only from Friday evening through Sunday evening. System administrators at ISPs tended to take off weekends, so they couldn’t respond to complaints about Hawke’s spamming until Monday. By then, his messages were already waiting in the in-boxes of hundreds of thousands of people.

The schedule essentially left Hawke with a five-day weekend. While the working stiffs of the world were chained to their desks, he was taking hikes in the woods with his wolf Dreighton, working on his knife-throwing technique, or polishing up his archery skills. Hawke also whiled away his time reading chess books and polishing his playing skills against online opponents through an interactive system called Internet Chess Club.

But as Hawke watched the ever-larger deposits from his credit card processor arrive in his bank account, he got nervous. The money seemed too vulnerable there. One day he withdrew a couple thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. Using rubber bands, he tightly wrapped the stack of bills in heavy black plastic sheeting and placed them in a plastic bottle. Hawke put the bottle and a small spade in a backpack and headed on foot with Dreighton deep into Tennessee’s Cherokee National Park. When Hawke located a good spot, away from any trails but near some memorable landmarks, he dug a hole and buried the bottle. It would be the first of several stashes of cash that he would refer to as his “deposits.”^[3]

At the end of June, Hawke decided to go to Philadelphia for the 2001 World Open chess tournament. With Patricia staying behind to run QuikSilver, he headed out on the nine-hour drive north. To keep himself alert, he listened to books on tape, including A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Hawke had read the Cambridge University professor’s book a few years before, but he still found himself mesmerized as he motored up I-81 while a British narrator read Hawking’s explanation of Einstein’s theory of relativity and other concepts of astrophysics.

The tournament was held in a large hotel in the northwestern suburbs of Philly. Hawke found the conference room set aside for registration and began filling out an entry form using his Walter Smith pseudonym. As he was leaning over the table, Hawke heard a loud voice behind him.^[4]

“Britt Greenbaum? Yo, is that you Britt?”

Hawke winced and turned around. He recognized Mauricio Ruiz, a talented chess player he hadn’t seen since he left Massachusetts. Ruiz was a good looking, happy-go-lucky guy, a couple of years younger than Hawke.

“Hey, Maury,” he said cautiously.

“What have you been up to lately, Britt? I hardly recognized you.”

Hawke shot a glance at the woman working the registration table and took a step toward Ruiz.

“Call me Walter now, ok?”

“No problem...Walter,” said Ruiz.

Ruiz invited Hawke to join him in the skittles room down the hall, where players hung out and challenged each other in informal matches. Hawke agreed to meet him there after he finished registering.

Hawke liked to think of himself as imperturbable, but bumping into Ruiz had knocked him a bit off balance. Hawke had known Ruiz since 1991, when they met at a chess tournament in Providence, Ruiz’s hometown. Hawke was just thirteen at the time, and Ruiz was eleven. But the younger boy had already established a higher USCF rating, and earlier that year had won the national sixth-grade chess championship. Still, Hawke managed to finish the tournament in twelfth place, one place ahead of Ruiz. Over the next several years the two occasionally crossed paths at tournaments in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Mauricio’s dad, like Hawke’s parents, sometimes entered tournaments with his son. Rolando Ruiz played in the same division as Hy and Peggy Greenbaum, and the adults struck up a casual friendship.

Hawke didn’t face Ruiz directly in tournament play until 1995. By then, Mauricio was clearly the stronger player, having established a USCF rating of around 2100, while Hawke, playing as Britt Greenbaum, had hit a plateau in the 1900s. Ruiz defeated Greenbaum in the first round and went on to place third overall, with Britt coming in tenth. They hadn’t seen each other since that match.

When Hawke caught up with him in the skittles room, Ruiz was just about to sit down to a five-minute blitz match against a kid who couldn’t have been older than fourteen. As Ruiz was setting up his pieces, he told Hawke he had been attending Bryant College, a business school in Rhode Island. It was boring and he wanted to drop out, said Ruiz.

Hawke replied that he had quit college after his junior year and had gone into business for himself. But before Hawke had a chance to provide the details, he was interrupted. Ruiz loudly hailed a high-school-age kid who had just walked into the room.

“Brad Bournival, meet my old buddy Walter.”

Bournival, a pudgy, brown-haired 17-year-old from New Hampshire, shook hands with Hawke. Hawke asked him if he wanted to play a quick five-minute match for money.

“How much money?” asked Bournival.

“Five bucks a game,” suggested Hawke.

“Nah, I think I’ll pass,” he said.

After someone offered to put up the money for Bournival, he relented. As Hawke and Bournival were arranging themselves at a table and setting their time clocks, Hawke scrutinized the younger player.

“What’s your rating, by the way?”

Bournival hesitated. “Nineteen hundred.”

“Good,” said Hawke. “Me, too.”

They ended up splitting two matches, with Hawke taking the first and Bournival beating him in the second game. Hawke’s matches with Bournival in the skittles room would be the best he’d play in Philadelphia. After taking a draw in his first match, Hawke was beaten by his next two opponents and decided to withdraw. His play gave him a 215^th-place finish out of 226 entrants in the open division. Ruiz fared better, coming in 123rd. As it turned out, Bournival had lied to Hawke about his rating, which was actually over 2100. But Bournival played above himself at the tournament. He upset several stronger players—including William Mark Paschall, who had a 2500 rating—and finished 90th overall.

Hawke and Bournival would cross paths again a few weeks later. In August of 2001, Hawke returned to the Northeast to play in the U.S. Open tournament in Framingham, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. It was the closest he had been to his parent’s house in over two years. But he didn’t even tell them he was in town. Instead, Hawke surprised his grandparents on his mother’s side by calling them at the last minute and asking if he could crash there. They lived in Westwood and said he was welcome any time he was in the area. (Hawke’s grandfather, a vice president at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had always seemed more amused than upset about Hawke’s neo-Nazi period.)

The Framingham event was held in a Sheraton decorated on the outside to look like a castle. Matches took place at long tables in large conference rooms lit by massive chandeliers. Hawke, playing as Walter Smith, drew a player rated 1400 in the first round and quickly dispatched him. Bournival similarly beat his first opponent, who had just a 1600 rating. The two met afterwards in the skittles room. This time, Hawke challenged Bournival to a rematch of their five-minute game at twenty dollars per game.

Bournival laughed nervously. “Are you rich or something?”

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

With a flourish, Hawke pulled out his wallet and opened it wide so Bournival could see the contents. A thick collection of hundred-dollar bills was stuffed into it, easily totaling $5,000.

“Where did you get so much money?”

“I’m a spammer,” Hawke said proudly.

Bournival just stared at him. “What the hell is a spammer?”

Hawke was amazed that anyone alive in the year 2001 hadn’t heard of spam. He explained how he mailed out ads for diet pills and other products to email addresses all over the Internet, and a percentage of people placed orders. He told Bournival he worked only a couple days each week and spent the rest of the time playing chess or just hanging out. He even had a girlfriend who lived with him and looked after the business when he was away at chess tournaments.

Bournival listened intently as Hawke, whom he still knew as Walter Smith, described his business. The two couldn’t have been more different. Hawke’s long, dark hair was tied in a ponytail down his back, and his face was covered with a two-day-old beard. He wore a black T-shirt and a silver skull on a chain around his neck. In contrast, Bournival was dressed in a striped shirt with his hair neatly parted and gelled. He didn’t regale Hawke with a description of his own life, besides saying he would be a senior at West High in Manchester and had been playing chess for just three years. Hawke assumed Bournival came from a boring, middle-class background, and Bournival had no desire to correct that impression. He figured Hawke wouldn’t want to hear about how his parents divorced when he was ten. Or how he now lived with his half-brother and his mother, who was a crack cocaine user, along with her physically abusive black boyfriend, in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a three-story walk-up owned by Bournival’s grandmother. Or how his mom kept several Pekinese dogs in the apartment, none of which was entirely housebroken.

Yet somehow amidst that mayhem in Manchester, Bournival had taught himself to play chess. He discovered chess as a freshman in high school during a 1999 visit to the games section of the Yahoo! site. He immediately liked the game, so he joined the school’s chess team. A few months later, Bournival surprised many by winning the New Hampshire high school chess championship. Soon after that, people were paying Bournival ten dollars an hour for lessons. Chess was about the only thing that kept him from dropping out of school.

Time ran out before Hawke and Bournival got around to playing their skittles match. As they headed out for the next round, Bournival said he wanted to hear more about QuikSilver Enterprises. Hawke suggested a poker game that night with Mauricio Ruiz and anyone else willing to put up some cash. Bournival balked, never having played poker for money before. But he agreed anyway. When he left the skittles room, Bournival had the uncomfortable yet exhilarating feeling that Hawke could get him to do just about anything.^[5]

As it turned out, Bournival somehow managed to win ten dollars at the poker table that evening. Even better, he convinced Hawke to tutor him about spamming in exchange for half of what he earned from spam. The two traded email addresses, and Hawke said he would be contacting Bournival with instructions on how to get started.

In all other respects, it had been a mediocre tournament for Bournival. He beat the players he should have but lost his rematch with Paschall, finishing 150^th out of 480 players. Hawke, competing as Smith, played solidly as well, but pulled off no surprises en route to his 270^th-place finish.

But with his new spam income, Bournival would have all the money he needed to attend tournaments anywhere in the country. Even though he had managed a 3.8 GPA his junior year, Bournival departed Framingham knowing he would not return to West High that fall.

“You can call me Johnny,” Hawke told him as they said goodbye.

In the spam wars, the best defense is often a good offense. That’s why Davis Hawke began spiking his spams with intimidating legalese in September 2000. At the bottom of the ads he placed a notice informing recipients that QuikSilver’s spam was sent “in compliance with federal guidelines governing the transmission of unsolicited commercial email.”

Hawke also added a link to a page at SpamLaws.com containing the text of the Unsolicited Electronic Mail Act of 1999, also known as H.R. 3113. He closed the spams with his favorite excerpt from the Act: “Unsolicited commercial electronic mail can be an important mechanism through which businesses advertise and attract customers in the online environment.”

Never mind that H.R. 3113 had died in the U.S. Senate in July of 2000. And Congress had so far failed to approve any other federal laws regulating junk email. Hawke’s disclaimer did the trick: it kept would-be anti-spammers at bay. (Hawke wasn’t the only junk emailer using the technique. In fact, at one point in 2001, the operator of SpamLaws.com, law professor David E. Sorkin, put up a notice explaining that he was not responsible for disclaimers included in spam emails that linked to his site.)

Before it languished in the Senate, H.R. 3113 had received support from two powerful opposing groups: the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and a grassroots organization known as the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. CAUCE was led by a number of respected anti-spam veterans and boasted over 20,000 members in 2000. Thanks to efforts by CAUCE on behalf of the bill’s author, Heather Wilson, and cosponsors Gary Miller and Gene Green, H.R. 3113 breezed through the House by a vote of 427-1 on July 18.

But Senators were partial to S.R. 2542, a companion bill from their Senate colleagues, and they never took a vote on Wilson’s legislation. But they also failed to summon much enthusiasm for S.R. 2542. Entitled the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2000 (CAN-SPAM), the Senate bill never made it out of the Senate’s commerce committee. As a result, the 106^th session of Congress concluded without a federal junk-email law.

Hawke continued citing H.R. 3113 in his disclaimer well into 2001. By then, Wilson had introduced a new version of her spam bill. Like its predecessor, H.R. 718 proposed that junk emailers be required to conspicuously label their messages as spam. The new bill similarly called for spammers to include their correct street and email addresses in their ads and prohibited them from falsifying the routing information in their messages’ headers. H.R. 718 also made it a crime for spammers to continue sending ads to anyone who asked to be removed from their mailing lists.

But this time, Wilson’s Unsolicited Electronic Mail Act faced a new hurdle getting through the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Lobbyists from the DMA as well as the banking industry cajoled committee members to remove a provision of H.R. 718 that would have enabled businesses, schools, or Internet service providers to post a “Spam Free Zone” sign on their mail servers. Under the original language, marketers who disregarded the notice and spammed anyway would be subject to stiff fines. But that language was gone from the version of the bill approved by the committee in March 2001. What’s more, the updated version required that all mail server operators install spam-filtering software or else lose their right to sue violators of the law.

Many junk email fighters who had supported Wilson’s original bill suddenly withdrew their backing. CAUCE condemned the revised legislation as a “costly, messy pro-spam bill,” and predicted it would result in more spam rather than less. In a statement, CAUCE said it “remains hopeful that the unfortunate changes to the bill can yet be corrected, and we remain very appreciative of Rep. Heather Wilson’s efforts on behalf of consumers.”^[6]

Despite CAUCE’s objections, the revised legislation, which now had over one hundred cosponsors, moved forward and was scheduled for debate on the House floor in the second week of September. Wilson’s goal of getting a federal spam law on the books, albeit a flawed one by some standards, once again seemed within reach.

Then a group of hijackers rammed two passenger jetliners into New York’s World Trade Center. Terrorists commandeered a third jet and struck the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., while another plane was crashed in a Pennsylvania field.

In an instant, controlling the junk email problem became a trivial pursuit, even for many anti-spammers. On September 11, operators of several spam block lists announced they were temporarily suspending operations in order to allow email to flow unimpeded during rescue efforts. Among them was Spamhaus operator Steve Linford, who decided that the Spamhaus Block List, which he had launched just weeks before, would go on a hiatus until further notice.

“From what we understand there are no telephone communications in or out of Manhattan but Internet communications are still working ... Therefore this is not an appropriate moment for any blacklist which may be blocking IPs of hosts in Manhattan to be operating,” said Linford in a notice on Nanae.

But for some spammers and fraud artists, the 9/11 attacks on America presented a golden opportunity. In some cases, spammers sent phony condolences that were just tasteless ways to drive traffic to their shopping sites. In others, spammers looked to capitalize on the fear of additional terrorist attacks. Email ads for survival kits and anthrax treatments were all the rage in the weeks following September 11.

“The U.S. is under serious threats of Biological, Chemical and Nuclear attacks!” shouted one spam for fifty-dollar gas masks. “Don’t wait until it is too late! Protect yourself and your family today!” advised the ad. A few months before, the company hawking the gas masks had been advertising credit card merchant accounts.

But more sinister ads appeared as well. On September 12, an email message bearing the subject line “Help for the Red Cross and the victims of our Nation’s tragedy” began arriving in email in-boxes. The spam was sent through a computer in Belgium and solicited donations to the “Express Relief Fund” and the “Victims Survivor Fund.” Recipients were directed to hand over their credit card numbers at a makeshift site. A week before, the same site had been selling what it called “Viagra for Women.” Around mid-September, the site disappeared completely.

In some cases, the motives of opportunistic spammers were harder to judge. Using the Postmaster General system, a Denver, Colorado, company called SaveRealBig.com deluged the Internet with messages on the evening of September 11. The spams were identified as coming from the company’s 29-year-old CEO, Scott Richter. They had the subject line “Help us support our nation” and invited recipients to purchase large nylon U.S. flags for twenty dollars at the SaveRealBig.com site. The messages said “all available proceeds” would be donated to “emergency and relief efforts.”

Anti-spammers were immediately suspicious. Spamhaus’s Steve Linford posted a copy of SaveRealBig.com’s spam on Nanae and suggested it was a scam designed to put money in Richter’s pockets. In recent weeks, Richter’s company had been using Postmaster General to send ads for products ranging from diet pills to Ginsu knives to pagers. The company was also sending out spams for an adult entertainment site Richter owned called Ejackolate.com. Suddenly those offerings were no longer listed on the SaveRealBig.com home page. In their place appeared information on ordering U.S. flags.

To fend off skeptics, Richter updated the page a few days later with a photo of himself making a donation at the Denver chapter of the American Red Cross. A note from Richter claimed that he had given $20,000 dollars to the relief agency. On a message board he had set up to take comments about the fund-raising effort, Richter posted this introduction:

Spews didn’t wait around for proof that Richter was squeaky clean. Later that month, a large block of Internet addresses, including those used by SaveRealBig.com and several other Richter sites, showed up on the Spews blacklist. In response, Richter’s ISP eventually cut off service to the sites, forcing him to line up new hosting.

After the hassles and the suspicion, Richter vowed he’d never again do online charity fundraising. But even if he didn’t reap any big profits from selling over 10,000 flags, he did acquire a fresh list of “opt-in” email addresses. (The privacy policy at SaveRealBig.com made it clear that the company reserved the right to use information collected from customers “for the purpose of targeted marketing opportunities.”)

Richter was on his way to building what would soon become a list of over forty-five million addresses, enabling him to send out tens of millions of spams every day. But by 2003, Richter’s spamming would earn him a top-three spot on Spamhaus’s Rokso and a lawsuit from Microsoft and the State of New York.

But in the wake of 9/11, it was a flurry of messages from Ohio-based spammer Tom Cowles that caused the biggest uproar from anti-spammers. On September 12, hundreds of thousands of the bizarre emails started hitting in-boxes. All bore Internet addresses registered to Cowles’s Leverage Communications and carried the provocative subject line, “How you can help WTC victims. (BTW: Anti-spammers Support Bin Laden!)”

The top third of the message listed the addresses of web sites operated by the Red Cross and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the bottom third was a collection of already well-publicized phone numbers set up for relatives of potential victims by airlines and other entities involved in the attacks. Sandwiched between the two sections was a single-spaced, 250-word rant against spam opponents.

“Anti-spammers are terrorists at heart and attack websites and email accounts of companies wishing to bring their products and services to the general public via email, an environmentally sound, REMARKABLE medium!” cried out Cowles’s message. It also accused anti-spammers of launching denial-of-service attacks against his site, an act which he said was akin to terrorist violence.

“American marketers are under Attack! For apparently using environmentally sound bulk email to deliver products, services and public service messages,” said the message. It added that recipients should do their part “to help Freedom and the American way” by requesting to be removed from a marketer’s list. “Not,” said the message, “by harassing his vendors, dial-up providers or website companies.” The section concluded by warning recipients that “when you make yourself known to be an anti-bulkemailer, you align yourself with Hackers, Terrorists and Un-American groups.”

Upon seeing the bizarre spams, Steve Linford said it was time to consider placing Cowles’s ISP, SprintLink, on the new Spamhaus Block List. Linford also added an entry about the incident to Cowles’s listing on Rokso. “All we can assume is that someone at Empire Towers is in need of some immediate psychiatric attention; this is truly sick,” concluded the entry.

For Karen Hoffmann, the Toledo anti-spammer who had been on a mission to track Cowles’s every move, the strange 9/11 messages from Empire Towers were her first sighting of Cowles in months. Hoffmann posted a copy of his spam at the web page she had dedicated to Cowles, and, in a message on Nanae, she said she was shocked that he would stoop so low as to use the attacks on America as an occasion to criticize anti-spammers.

Then Hoffmann tried making a direct appeal to Cowles: “Tom, if you’re reading this, please contact me via email.”

Hawke belatedly kept his promise to Bournival. In September 2001, an email message arrived from “Johnny Durango” (an alias Hawke was using at the time). Hawke invited him to meet him that Friday night at the Internet Chess Club, a chess site located at ChessClub.com.

ICC was one of the top online chess organizations and had attracted thousands of members since the early 90s. ICC programmers developed software that enabled chess players to compete against other members all over the world. Besides a graphical user interface that allowed players to move chess pieces on their computer screens with a click of a mouse, the program also had a chat feature so members could converse while they watched or played online matches.

Bournival had relied on ICC chat for giving chess lessons, and he felt right at home when Hawke suggested they use the technology to discuss spamming. On the system, Bournival’s “handle,” or nickname, was FrappeBoy, a name he had chosen because the ice-cream drink was one of his favorites. (On that Friday evening, Hawke used the handle SchoolShooter, in reference to the Columbine high school massacre. He enjoyed choosing online nicknames that threw his opponents off balance.)

After Bournival located Hawke, he sent the system a command instructing it to create a scratch game. Then he sent a message to Hawke to let him know the number of the game board he had created.

Once they both had the board up on their screens, Hawke and Bournival didn’t actually play chess. Using the system’s “kibitz” command, Hawke told Bournival that he had decided to let him take over his pheromone business in exchange for a 50 percent cut of his sales. To get him started, Hawke said he would send Bournival his ad and a list of 50,000 email addresses he had harvested from eBay. He instructed Bournival to get a copy of Group Mail, a free mailing program from a company called Aureate Media. Hawke said he would wait while Bournival downloaded the program so Hawke could show him how to configure the software’s various settings.

As Bournival was navigating to the Aureate web site, the program’s console indicated that someone else had joined them. (ICC games were generally open to other members, who could watch the game and trade comments using the kibitz command.) It was Mauricio Ruiz who had wandered in.

“Yo, Johnny. Is this where I learn Spamming 101?” Ruiz asked.^[7]

“Pull up a chair, grasshopper. I was just telling Brad how to get started,” said Hawke.

A rapid typist, Hawke said they should begin by signing up for Internet access accounts with several low-cost ISPs. A company called StarNet was his personal favorite. Hawke told them to configure Group Mail to send their messages through one of the ISPs’ mail servers. That took care of the sending side of the business. To take customer orders, Hawke instructed them to register a couple of web sites with a low-cost hosting service such as ValueWeb. Hawke said he would email them the HTML web page code he used. The code included a link to a form Hawke had created for gathering order data and processing credit card transactions.

“At the end of each month, I’ll add up your orders and cash you out,” said Hawke. He told each of them to email him a street address to which he should send checks with their earnings.

At that point, Ruiz had grown bored with the tutoring session and suddenly headed out after saying a quick goodbye. Hawke was eager to finish up as well.

“One last thing,” Hawke said to Bournival. “You’re going to need product.”

Hawke said he’d make the trek to New Hampshire in the next week or two and bring Bournival a couple of cases of pheromone concentrate. After Bournival sold those, he could restock directly from the supplier in Wichita, Hawke said. Then he told Bournival he’d be in touch soon and signed off.

Nearly a month went by, and “Johnny” still hadn’t delivered the pheromone. Bournival had stopped going to classes at Manchester West High and tried to occupy himself with assembling the other aspects of his new spam business. He bought a book about web site design and created a couple pages for taking pheromone orders based on Hawke’s design. As Hawke suggested, he did some small trial runs with Group Mail, sending spams to test addresses he had created, known in spammer parlance as seed accounts. When he ran out of things to do, Bournival registered the address NHChess.org and started building a site for the New Hampshire Chess Association, the chess club he had joined soon after discovering the game in 1999.

When Hawke finally showed up at Bournival’s apartment, located on a treeless section of Montgomery Street on the western side of Manchester, he and Bournival lugged two large cardboard boxes of pheromone bottles from the trunk of his car up the flight of stairs to the second-floor apartment.

Inside, Hawke looked around the cramped home. Bournival’s computer was on a desk in the room he shared with his stepbrother. The dogs were yapping and franticly darting around the apartment.

“When business takes off, you’re going to want your own office,” Hawke said. In the meantime, he suggested the two of them should get a post office box in the QuikSilver company name. That way, Bournival could keep his home address a secret from customers. Using Hawke’s car, they drove the mile and a half into downtown Manchester to get something to eat and visit the Mail Boxes Etc. branch on Elm Street.

As they were filling out the paperwork for the post office box, the clerk at the Mail Boxes Etc. store said she would need to see identification from each of them. Bournival produced his driver’s license, and Hawke slapped his down on the counter as well. As the clerk recorded the information from the two cards, Bournival could make out the word “Massachusetts” across the top of Hawke’s license. “Johnny” had told him his grandparents lived outside Boston and that he planned to spend the evening there on his return home to Tennessee. But as Bournival focused more intently on the upside-down card, he was puzzled to see the name Davis Hawke.

Bournival didn’t ask “Johnny” about the name on the license, figuring it was just part of his effort to protect QuikSilver Enterprises from sabotage. (Bournival considered QuikSilver, with its connotation of mercurial speed and trickery, the perfect name for an Internet marketing company.) But that evening, after Hawke said goodbye and headed for Route Three to Boston, Bournival went online and typed “Davis Hawke” into the Google search engine.

At the top of the search results were a handful of news articles about Hawke’s neo-Nazi days, along with several pages devoted to him at the web site of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracked hate groups. Bournival read each of the articles carefully as the recognition sunk in. Hawke didn’t use aliases such as “Johnny Durango” or “Walter Smith” simply because anonymity made life as a spammer easier. Hawke did it because he was also hiding from his past.