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.^[1]

To help with the finances, Patricia was working as an assistant at a karate studio in a Spartanburg shopping plaza. That left Hawke alone in the trailer most afternoons. It was a bit like his high school days, when he would come home from school and read or go online for hours. His mother used to beg him to get outside for fresh air or to call a friend to play tennis. But aside from weekend chess tournaments, Britt, as his parents called him, rarely ventured out and instead spent much of his free time on the Internet. Sometimes he’d play chess with other Internet users, but mostly he was surfing the Web or hanging out in chat rooms. When his mother would came and checked in on him, Britt quickly pushed the Alt and Tab keys to bring up a chessboard screen.

Peggy Ambler Davis Greenbaum had no reason to be suspicious of her son. Throughout his childhood, Britt never needed disciplining. When he was an elementary and middle school student in rural Lakeville, Massachusetts, teachers singled him out, praising him for both his schoolwork and his chess. (“The next Bobby Fischer!” they’d exclaim.)

Teachers didn’t realize that in their efforts to motivate other students to be like Britt, they had incited some to hate him. Kids detested his braininess, his pretty-boy looks, and his Jewish last name. A shy child, Britt was an easy target for teasing and, eventually, physical abuse, although he never reported it to his parents. Once in sixth grade when he was in his room changing, his mom noticed scratches and bruises all over his back. When she forced him to explain, he told her bullies had thrown him over a chair. The next day his mom marched Britt into the principal’s office to complain. But the principal only made her more furious.

“Tell Britt to fight back,” he advised, “and if he manages to beat up the kids, take him out to dinner to celebrate.”

There were no celebratory dinners. Instead, Britt’s parents moved the family to Westwood, a suburb of Boston they hoped would have fewer rednecks. The strategy worked. In the more affluent town his last name and scholarship were much less conspicuous. But as other Westwood High students were being drawn into sports or social events after school, Britt was rereading Hitler’s Mein Kampf or wandering the Internet’s back alleys, where he discovered white-supremacy web sites.

Now, after shuttering his own neo-Nazi web site and email accounts, Hawke had lost contact with his former comrades. The trailer was still loaded with Nazi gear, but it no longer had such a powerful effect on him. He still liked to carry around his SS dagger, but he never wore the uniforms anymore. Most of the Nazi items had just become eBay inventory. The stuff practically sold itself, and he completed around a dozen successful auctions every day. Yet Hawke quickly grew weary of the labor involved. He calculated that selling a swastika pin that netted him five dollars in profits easily consumed half an hour of his time, if you figured in exchanging emails with prospective buyers, packaging and shipping, and the occasional hassles over collecting payments. He could be making that kind of money working retail at the Spartanburg mall.

Fortunately, Hawke had stumbled upon an easier way. Around Labor Day, he received an email at his Yahoo! account advertising an Internet marketing kit. For ninety-nine dollars, Hawke could buy Stealth Mail Bomber—a software program for sending emails in bulk—along with a mailing list of one million addresses, and a manual about selling on the Internet.

As he read the ad, Hawke brightened. The most effortless way to do e-commerce, he realized, would be to sell digital rather than physical goods—products such as software or electronic newsletters and books that could be marketed and delivered over the Internet without any heavy lifting. Hawke visited the web site listed in the message and ordered the kit using his nearly maxed-out credit card. The next day, an email arrived with directions on how to copy the kit from an Internet site.

After downloading and unpacking the files, Hawke skimmed the manual. As he expected, it was thin on content—just a twenty-page Microsoft Word document full of e-business platitudes the author had probably cut and pasted from a web site or cribbed from a booklet off a supermarket rack. (As Hawke had hoped, there was no copyright notice or even the author’s name anywhere in the document.) Stealth Mail Bomber, on the other hand, appeared packed with features, although it was a bit confusing. And the address list intrigued him. As he scrolled through the seemingly bottomless file, Hawke did some quick calculations. If he could sell the manual to just 1 percent of the people for, say, twenty dollars, he’d make $200,000 on his hundred-dollar investment.

Television news reports that evening said Hurricane Floyd was whipping Hilton Head Island and other coastal towns with several inches of rain per hour and winds over sixty miles per hour. Something about the approaching storm spurred Hawke to move ahead quickly with his new venture. He surfed to the Network Solutions web site and registered a new domain, WebManual2000.com. When prompted for his name, Hawke listed James Kincaid, although he provided his real Spartanburg post office box as the mailing address as well as his own phone number. He also made arrangements online with Interspeed Network, a California ISP, to host the WebManual2000 site on its servers.

The next day, Floyd swerved up the coast to North Carolina, sparing South Carolina major damage. The sun was shining in Chesnee as Hawke began designing the WebManual2000.com site using Netscape Composer, a program for writing hypertext mark-up language (HTML), the code used to display web pages. In his haste he didn’t realize he had neglected to update the author setting on Composer’s preferences menu since creating the Knights of Freedom site. As a result, buried in the code of the new site was one of Hawke’s former aliases: Walther Krueger, a German officer decorated in World War II. Hawke intentionally borrowed one feature from KOF.net: a special order form with which shoppers could input their name, email address, phone number, and credit card information. When they clicked a button, the information would be sent from WebManual2000.com to a new email account he set up for the business: [email protected].

A few days later, WebManual2000.com was almost ready for business. Then came the most important part: composing an email ad for the manual. He decided to sell the Web Manual for $19.99, taking a no-hype approach that borrowed much of its language from the original message he had received for the kit:

On the following Saturday night, Hawke finally had all the pieces in place. With Patricia watching over his shoulder, he fired up Stealth Mail Bomber. He configured the program to use “Learn How to Make $1,000,000 In Six Months—GUARANTEED!” as his message subject line. Then he signed on to the Internet and, with a smile at Patricia, clicked the program’s start button. They went to bed while the program slowly churned through his mailing list.

Hawke awoke early the next morning, eager to learn the results of his mailing. He was annoyed to find that his computer had somehow disconnected from the Internet during the night. According to the status window on Stealth Mail Bomber, the program had successfully sent out just over 108,000 copies of the Web Manual ad before going offline.

Hawke quickly reconnected to the Internet and logged in to the Yahoo! email account to check his orders. A message in red letters at the top of the in-box page cried out that his account was over quota and no longer able to accept new messages. It was jammed full of hundreds of notices from mail systems at AOL and other ISPs, informing him that addresses in his mailing list did not exist or were otherwise unreachable. Hawke scrolled through the in-box, hoping for some actual orders, but he could find none. He began deleting the bounced messages to make way for legitimate email.

After trimming his mailing list to avoid remailing the first hundred thousand addresses, Hawke started up Stealth Mail Bomber again and began a new run. As the program chugged along, firing out round after round of email ads, he realized that he’d eventually need a better-targeted list, ideally one consisting of eBay sellers or other Internet users who actually had an interest in doing business online. But he figured he had nothing to lose by sending the Web Manual ad to the rest of his list. After all, he told himself, sending email was essentially free.

Late the next afternoon, as Hawke was combing through a new batch of undelivered messages in his Yahoo! in-box, the phone rang.^[2] Patricia answered it.

“Someone wants to speak with James Kincaid,” she whispered with her hand cupped over the phone’s mouthpiece.

Hawke frowned, got up from his desk, and warily took the phone from her.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Kincaid? This is Roger over at InnovaNet,” drawled the voice at the other end.

“Okay ... What can I do for you Roger?”

“It has come to our attention that your account has been used to send out bulk unsolicited emails.”

Hawke paused. “I don’t know anything about any bulk emails,” he said innocently.

“Well, Mr. Kincaid, we have determined that your account was used to send out the emails. We have a policy against that,” said Roger.

Hawke wasn’t sure what to say.

“Have you read our acceptable use policy? It’s on our home page,” asked Roger.

“Ah, no, I don’t believe I have.”

“Well, I need to inform you that if this happens again we will terminate your account.”

“Okay,” Hawke replied slowly.

“All right then, Mr. Kincaid. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call. You have a nice day.”

Hawke hung up the phone. He did not like being made to feel guilty, and he was puzzled by the call. Stealth Mail Bomber’s instructions specifically promised that the program contained special cloaking code that would make it undetectable by the user’s ISP. So how did InnovaNet know he was sending out the ads? Were they tapping his line somehow? He could have asked Roger, but that would have been an admission of guilt. Hawke decided it was time to begin shopping around for a new ISP.

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.^[3] 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:

To further whip up the paranoia of spammers, Cartel members made a point of littering their Nanae postings with thinly veiled references to payoffs received from lumber companies, along with denials that the anti-spam group existed. Many signed their messages with the phrase “there is no Lumber Cartel” or simply used the acronym TINLC. In early June 1999, Shiksaa configured her newsgroup reader so that it automatically added a signature line to her Nanae postings: “I am not a member of a nonexistent group of anti-spammers but if I were, I would be honored to be #782.” She abandoned the sig a few days later after deciding it looked tacky.

Despite her lack of experience and technical sophistication, Shiksaa proved to be a precocious spammer tracker. One early incident in particular earned the respect and admiration of veteran junk-email opponents. It occurred in early June of 1999, when she received email advertising PCs that could be purchased with monthly payments. (“YOU NEED A NEW COMPUTER!” shouted the spam’s subject line.)

Studying the message’s headers—the technical data that revealed the email’s path across the Internet to AOL’s mail server—Shiksaa determined that the sender had forged the return address so that the email appeared to originate from a site catering to kids. In the body of the message, there was a web site address for ordering the computer systems online. But to shield himself further, the spammer had obfuscated the URL; unlike normal web addresses that contain ordinary alphanumeric characters, it had been translated by the spammer instead into hexadecimal data easily decipherable only by a computer.

Shiksaa cut and pasted the encoded URL into a form at a special anti-spam web site she had read about on Nanae called SamSpade.org. It converted the obfuscated address back into regular characters, which enabled her to determine that the spammer’s site was hosted on a computer operated by a small ISP in California.

On a whim, Shiksaa then tried a simple investigative technique she had read about on Nanae. In her web browser’s address bar, she trimmed off some of the characters to the right of the final forward slash in the site’s address and then hit the Enter key. Rather than displaying an ordinary web page designed by the site’s operator, the new address provided a peek behind the curtain, revealing instead a list of files stored on the web server. When she clicked on one of the files, her browser displayed what appeared to be hundreds of orders.

Shiksaa gasped in disbelief. Besides street and email addresses, the file included customers’ credit card numbers and telephone numbers, all totally unsecured and accessible to anyone who stumbled upon it with their web browsers. Whoever had created the site obviously placed a higher priority on concealing his own identity than on protecting his customers’ personal information. (Most legitimate shopping sites never store credit card numbers on their web servers, and when they do, the numbers are locked away from prying eyes using encryption.)

Shiksaa quickly scanned some of the other exposed files on the server. There were several large ones containing email addresses, likely the spammer’s mailing lists. One file contained a log that appeared to include the spammer’s true AOL email address. She typed the address into Deja News, the newsgroup search engine, and found several spam complaints linking the address to an Oregon man named Glenn Conley. Besides sending spam touting cheap computers, Conley had apparently also been LARTed for numerous junk emails touting pornography and get-rich-quick schemes.

Shiksaa posted a message to Nanae announcing her discovery and asking for advice on what to do next. The experts told her to copy all of the files from the server and dispatch them immediately to AOL’s legal department as well as to the ISP hosting the site. She obliged and promptly got an automated acknowledgement from AOL. But weeks went by, and the spammer’s site, including the growing list of customer orders, was still online. When Shiksaa mentioned this to Nanae regulars, they told her to get used to it. Most abuse reports, they said, end up in what they called the bit bucket—the electronic garbage can.

But as it turned out, Shiksaa’s notification to AOL may have done some good. Seven months later, in February 2000, AOL helped federal authorities indict Conley for using spam to commit securities fraud. From October 1999 through January 2000, Conley and a partner had used stolen credit card numbers to open accounts at twenty ISPs. Then they purchased thousands of shares of penny stocks in companies with little or no revenue. Next they proceeded to pump up the stocks’ value by sending millions of spams to AOL users, touting the stocks’ prospects. (Conley composed some of the messages to make them appear like communication between two friends, using subject lines such as “Hey Bob...This STOCK is gonna BLOW UP!”) Gullible investors reacted to the messages by purchasing the stocks, which drove up the stocks’ prices. That’s when Conley and his partner dumped their shares, but not before making a cool million dollars. Conley was eventually sentenced to twenty-seven months in prison for his role in the scam.

With Shiksaa’s rising profile in Nanae, and her daily slew of LARTs, it wasn’t long before spammers took notice of the new “anti” in town. One morning in early July of 1999, Shiksaa was sitting at her computer when AOL’s instant message service popped up a window from a stranger.^[4]

“Hi, anti spammer, are you ready to die?” asked the person, who used the nickname Lime Pro.

Shiksaa froze when she read the words. At long last, she was virtually face to face with one of the low-life scum who had become her obsession for the past several months. Shiksaa couldn’t recall where she had seen Lime Pro’s nickname, but she guessed he was one of the dozens of people she had recently reported for spamming. After making sure that her computer was keeping a log file of the AOL chat session, she cautiously engaged Lime Pro in conversation.

“Are you ready to lose your account?” she replied.

He instantly began slinging insults at her (“How much of a dumb ass are you”) and said he was in the process of hacking her IM account. Fighting against adrenalin, Shiksaa tried to remain calm. Could he really do that? She had heard reports of AOL hackers exploiting flaws in the service’s software to take control of other users’ accounts. And sure enough, when she tried to click the Messenger program’s “Notify” button, which was designed to alert AOL about abusive users, nothing happened.

Shiksaa knew that she could just sign off the service and avoid the confrontation. But she couldn’t resist asking Lime Pro a question first.

“Why do you spam?”

Now it was Lime Pro’s turn to be dumbfounded. He stumbled over his words a bit and then finally explained that he was earning $800 per week sending junk email, and that he owned a new Corvette and was co-owner of a restaurant in Pennsylvania. All of this, he added, despite the fact that he was only seventeen.

When Shiksaa typed “LOL” and told him she sincerely doubted it, Lime Pro went silent. Moments later, it was he who signed off the service.

Shiksaa waited for several minutes for Lime Pro to return. Unsuccessful, she emailed a copy of her log file to AOL’s online abuse team. Then she posted a lighthearted description of the encounter on Nanae, with the subject line “[C&C] First death threat from spambag.” One anti-spammer who read it said she shouldn’t worry about the threats from Lime Pro, whom he said was probably “a zit-faced, scrawny 17-year old puke living in the back of mommy and daddy’s trailer.” But some folks in the newsgroup were troubled by Shiksaa’s report. “Not taking a threat seriously can be deadly,” warned one woman, who recommended that Shiksaa report the incident to her local police.

Shiksaa ignored the woman’s advice. She considered Lime Pro mostly harmless, and besides, she had been very careful about not saying anything to anyone online that would reveal her true identity. Still, when she went to bed that night, she checked her dresser to make sure the .357 Magnum handgun she had owned since 1975 was still there.

About a week later, in hopes of getting out from beneath the avalanche of spam burying her AOL account each day, Shiksaa signed up for a new email address with Microsoft’s free Hotmail service using her married name, Susan Wilson. Her plan was to use the address, carefully munged (camouflaged) of course, in her future Usenet postings. As she had done in the past, she would give out only her first name in any messages. In her newsreader’s setup menu, she replaced her AOL address with her new Hotmail account. But when she tried out the new account for the first time by posting a message to the alt.test group, for some reason her newsreader automatically signed the message with her full name, which is what she had used to sign up for Hotmail. On the Internet, the alias Shiksaa and Susan Wilson were now indelibly linked. It was the type of careless mistake that Shiksaa’s enemies would someday exploit.

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.

But the antis held their ground. They acknowledged Brunner’s claim that Avalanche could theoretically be used for distributing electronic newsletters and other non-spam purposes. They noted, however, that the program also included a number of features with no legitimate purpose, such as the ability to create fake headers aimed at covering the digital footprints of the software’s users and a technical trick that enabled Avalanche to force its messages into email servers intentionally locked down against spam.

In a show of support, Shiksaa posted a mirror image of Sapient Fridge’s Spamware list on her new personal home page. (The home page was a freebie that came with the new EarthLink ISP service she had signed up for a few weeks previously to test as a possible AOL replacement.) A couple of other antis, including Morely Dotes, followed with mirrors of their own. Meanwhile, Steve Linford, the operator of UXN, a London-based ISP, added CyberCreek to Spamhaus, his list of spam support services. Clearly, Brunner’s lawsuit bluff had failed.

Then, in late August, an anonymous person sent an email to all of the companies on the spamware list. The message was a call to action for spammers to fight fire with fire by filing complaints with the ISPs hosting the sites operated by Sapient Fridge, Linford, Shiksaa, and others. The sender of the message, who called himself Jolly Roger, also encouraged spammers to launch attacks against the sites, with the aim of knocking them offline with a flood of malicious traffic.

“Remember, if you don’t do this then you are giving up,” he wrote. “Imagine how good it would feel to get some revenge. Won’t it be ironic when we shut their asses down?”

Although the spamware vendors never rallied to Jolly Roger’s call to cyber war, Shiksaa watched with dismay as Nanae boiled with new disdain for Brunner. To taunt him, anti-spammers began referring to Brunner as “Spamdrew” and to his company as “CyberCrook,” and they mercilessly mocked him for his tendency toward misspellings such as “law suite.” Yet earlier that summer, some of the same people were memorializing the one-year anniversary of the death of Jim Nitchals, whom they described as the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. of the anti-spam movement. Just before dying of a brain hemorrhage in June of 1998, Nitchals had helped lead peace talks aimed at persuading Sanford Wallace to give up his spamming ways. (Ultimately, however, it took lawsuits to get Wallace to stop.)

Feeling emboldened by her recent conversations with spammers such as Lime Pro, Shiksaa decided to approach Brunner privately as an emissary from Nanae. One morning a few days before Labor Day weekend, she looked up CyberCreek’s phone number on its web site and called Brunner.

Brunner answered his cell phone on the first ring. He sounded surprised that she had called, and he remained suspicious, even after she earnestly announced her intention of ending the flame war. (In fact, Brunner’s high-pitched, scratchy voice made it hard for Shiksaa not to picture the gawky kid Alfalfa from the Little Rascals TV show.) But after they chatted a bit, including about the need for both sides to respect the other, Brunner clearly was disarmed. He confessed that he preferred not to sell software to spammers but that he was only trying to earn a living. At one point, he suggested he could modify Avalanche to disable the spamware features such as cloaking.

“If I do it, can you talk to those guys and get them to take me off their lists?” he asked.

“I can’t make any promises, Andy,” she replied, “but I don’t see why they wouldn’t do it.”

Shiksaa reported her conversation with Brunner on Nanae the following day, noting that she had made some progress in bringing him back from the dark side.

“I told him that he would be treated with respect if he would cut the shit and name calling,” she wrote. “I would hope that everyone could get beyond the past and work for the common goal. Let’s stop the flame war and work to stop the spam.”

But rather than applauding Shiksaa’s diplomatic efforts, many spam fighters criticized her for trying to strike a deal with Brunner.

“You seem terribly naïve. Con men do not reform and you are just making yourself the fall guy for another con,” wrote one Nanae regular, who added, “You seem to have an affinity for believing stories made up to appease you.”

Another chimed in: “It seems Susan is sort of new to this and is trying to reason with these individuals. It doesn’t work.”

Even Alan Murphy, a long-time spam fighter who had helped Shiksaa on a number of spam investigations, was skeptical of her attempts to get Brunner to revise Avalanche.

“I honestly don’t understand what you think Andrew intended to do with it beside promote spam. It was designed to abuse,” wrote Murphy.

Stung by the criticism and condescension, Shiksaa fired off a post to Nanae saying that she believed that treating Brunner with respect was the best tactic for bringing him around.

“Shoot me for trying,” she wrote.

Fearing Shiksaa was dangerously close to resigning from the corps of spam fighters, Murphy posted a public plea asking the group to back off in its criticism: “I’m very impressed by Susan’s ability to get people on the phone ... She doesn’t deserve the heat she got, and I know that she felt it.”

Shiksaa had little time to brood over the debate surrounding her peacekeeping mission. Two days later the operators of the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) added CyberCreek to their powerful and controversial spam blacklist. Run by Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS), a nonprofit consortium founded in 1997, the RBL included the network addresses of major spam operations as well as companies that provided them services. By configuring their mail servers—and in extreme cases, their network routers—to reject any traffic to or from addresses on the RBL, ISPs effectively were able to isolate spammers from communicating with parts of the Internet.

When he found out his company had been placed on the RBL, Brunner snapped. Jettisoning the conciliatory tone he had taken with Shiksaa, Brunner went into full verbal-combat mode. He configured his newsreader to add a new signature line at the bottom of all of his Usenet postings, “DEATH TO ALL NET-NAZIS!!!” His new sig also included the name, address, and home phone number of MAPS cofounder Paul Vixie, a California-based consultant and network engineer, as well as contact details for a handful of other leading anti-spammers. On September 9, 1999, Brunner posted a message to Nanae, calling Vixie a “fascist piece of anti-American, anti-business dirt” and warning that “When I am done with you, you won’t be able to wipe the dingle berries off Bill Gates’ ass.”

Brunner’s display of vitriol wasn’t aimed at Shiksaa, but it bothered her deeply. There she was, putting Andy forward to her Nanae brethren as a businessman who could be reasoned with. Instead, he revealed himself to be a cretin, justifying the warnings of those who had called her naïve. It cultivated in Shiksaa a strong desire to retaliate.

After contemplating some options, she launched Microsoft FrontPage Express, the HTML editor that came with her computer. In a couple of hours, she had whipped together a web page entitled “The Brunners of Chickenbone Creek.”

Using some photos she found online, Shiksaa assembled a simple collage on a bright red background. Beneath the photo of a Winnebago trailer she placed the caption “Home,” while she captioned a photo of an AirStream trailer with the words “Summer home.” Below an image of a young girl holding a bucket of fried chicken, Shiksaa added “The Future Mrs. Spamdrew Brunner.” She also found a photo of a can of Hormel SPAM in which the product’s name had been changed to SCAM. She gave it a caption that read “Staple of the Brunner household...err...trailerhold.”

To complete the page, Shiksaa added background music in the form of a midi file, which played a computer-generated version of the dueling banjos piece from the movie Deliverance whenever someone viewed the page. Then she uploaded the files to her Earthlink personal site and published a link to the page on Nanae.

The spam fighters were delighted with Shiksaa’s little creation. Several quickly posted glowing reviews. “A classic...truly inspired...You have earned a special place (TINSP) in the hall of NANAE-ites with that little gem,” wrote one.

After checking out Shiksaa’s Brunner parody page, a Nanae participant named Rick navigated to her new personal home page, where she had published a small photo of herself.

“Would it be ok if I had a mild crush on you?” he wrote.

Before Shiksaa could respond, a user from England named Ian chimed in, “Get off. She’s mine!”

Brunner, on the other hand, was not amused in the slightest. He posted an ominous, if grammatically puzzling, public challenge to Shiksaa.

“Why don’t you make it easy on me and give me your real address. When I find you I won’t let go until you are either penniless. At the very least you won’t be able to have a charge card. Enjoy the rest of your pathetic life,” wrote Brunner.

Shiksaa knew it was just another one of Brunner’s bluffs. He was a beaten, ineffectual man. Unless he drastically changed his business practices, CyberCreek.com would remain hopelessly black-holed from the rest of the Internet. At that point, there was really no reason to kick Brunner while he was down. But Shiksaa simply couldn’t resist.

“I meant to tell you,” she wrote in reply to Brunner’s threatening note on Nanae. “You have a little whiny voice and you sound like you can’t be older than 20. Has your voice finished changing yet? Get rid of that annoying adolescent acne?” Shiksaa signed the note, “Smooch, smooch, precious.”

Rereading her message when it appeared on Nanae, Shiksaa realized it sounded catty and mean-spirited. But it wasn’t really meant just for Brunner. She also intended it as a deterrent to spammers everywhere. Don’t mess with The Lady of LART.

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.

Looking back now on his aborted show-and-tell, Hawke realized that one of the greatest skills chess had taught him was not to allow small setbacks to thwart his grand strategy. Although his mother was furious to learn of the teacher’s reaction to his genealogy report, Hawke let the incident slide by. But eight years later, he quietly made the trip down to the Dedham courthouse to change his name. And neither parent opposed the move.

Hawke thumbed through the Greenville/Spartanburg Yellow Pages. He was looking for the section on Internet services. After a few phone calls, he arranged for a new dial-up account with a company in Anderson called Carolina Online. He signed onto Carol.net and began piecing together his next Venture Alpha offering.

This time, he would market something called Million Dollar Publishing Company in a Box. He had got the idea a few weeks back from a piece of junk email that arrived in his Yahoo! in-box. The message, apparently sent by a company in western Massachusetts, advertised a CD-ROM with advice on how to start a home-based business selling “information through the mail.” For ninety-nine dollars, the author was willing to part with full reprint rights to hundreds of reports on topics ranging from how to win a sweepstakes contest to how to become a TV or movie star.

Hawke recognized the offer for the scam it was. Like the Web Manual, the only people likely to buy the Publishing Company in a Box were other spammers. It wasn’t quite a pyramid scheme, but it relied on some of the same twisted logic. Hawke chuckled at one especially clever part of the ad:

The author even promised to return, uncashed, any checks he received after selling his quota of fifty kits. Hawke realized he would be ecstatic if he made $5,000 from his hundred-dollar investment. Then again, if hundreds of orders rolled in, who would know besides him? Hawke purchased the CD-ROM, determined this time to make some serious money before spam haters got in his way.

When the CD arrived in the mail, Hawke took it to a computer store in Spartanburg that charged five dollars per CD to burn two dozen copies for him. Since Interspeed had shut down his WebManual2000.com site for violating its terms of service, Hawke had to come up with a temporary work-around until he could find a new host for the domain. He uploaded a copy of the old site’s files, slightly modified for his new venture, from his PC to a home page he had created at Angelfire.com.

A free, ad-supported home page provider catering to consumers, Boston-based Angelfire had two big drawbacks. It didn’t allow members to advertise their home pages using spam or to run programs for processing online orders. To fill the latter gap, Hawke signed up at CartManager.net for a fourteen-day demonstration. The Utah-based electronic shopping cart service would enable him to seamlessly submit orders from his Angelfire site to his account at CartManager.

After creating a new email account for the project, [email protected], Hawke worked on his ad copy. He used the original message almost verbatim, with necessary changes to the ordering information. Hawke also modified a section at the bottom of the ad that instructed recipients on how they could opt out of future mailings. In hopes of mollifying spam haters, Hawke whipped up this version instead:

As a further countermeasure against complaint-related interruptions, Hawke decided to switch mailing programs. He’d received a spam advertising a package called Extractor Pro, which, according to its web site, was designed to send ads onto the Internet through third-party mail servers known as open relays. These machines, usually operated by businesses, universities, and other organizations, had been configured (either out of courtesy or neglect) to allow unauthorized users to bounce their messages off the servers en route to their final destinations. As a result, recipients of the messages who examined the headers could trace their origin back to the open relays but usually not to the sender’s ISP. Hawke purchased and downloaded a copy of Extractor Pro from the company’s web site.

On October 20, 1999, Hawke was ready to broadcast his new ad for Publishing Company in a Box. He signed on to Carol.net and configured Extractor Pro to use the half-million fresh email addresses that came with the program.

Meanwhile, nearly five hundred miles away in Washington, D.C., Heather Wilson, a republican from New Mexico, was introducing the Unsolicited Electronic Mail Act of 1999 to the U.S. House of Representatives. If enacted into law, the bill would require email marketers to use real return addresses on their messages, provide opt-out features, and abstain from forging their messages’ headers. A failure to comply could open them up to private lawsuits from individuals or ISPs to the tune of five hundred dollars per infringing message.

But Hawke wasn’t paying attention to national news, much less to pending federal legislation. After double-checking to make sure Extractor Pro had successfully connected to a set of relay servers, he took a deep breath and pushed the program’s start button. Tomorrow, the 21^st, he would turn twenty-one—his golden birthday. Who knew what it might bring?