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

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

“How would you characterize your feeling, your religious beliefs in relation to the work that you do?” asked Allison Harnisch, a trial lawyer with the Department of Justice’s Office of Consumer Litigation.^[1]

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

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

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

“Do you want to stay in business, this business?” Harnisch asked him.

Vale stiffened. “Is that a threat?”

“It’s just a question,” she said.

“I would love to stay supplying seeds,” he replied.

Who wouldn’t? Before Vale launched the company, he was working construction and running a billiard parlor. Now, he was grossing easily $300,000 a year from his low-overhead spam business, shipping out nearly a ton of apricot pits and over 100 boxes of tablets a month.

Harnisch asked what Vale would do if the court said he could no longer sell apricot seeds or B₁₇.

“I would listen to the court if the court said that I can’t sell B₁₇,” he replied. But then he added, “If it said I can’t sell seeds, that’s a different story.”

“Why would the seeds be a different story?”

Vale explained how the state of Arizona allowed the sale of apricot seeds as a nutritional supplement and how companies all over the place were selling them. He told her about how he called the FDA once and even it said he could do it.

“Mr. Vale,” his lawyer butted in. “Just answer her questions. Just keep it to answering her questions.”

“Can I go to the bathroom?” Vale asked.

Out in the hallway, Vale let out a deep breath and headed for the men’s room. He’d told customers that he was in a David-versus-Goliath battle, but he’d actually faced much bigger opponents than the U.S. government. The summer after his high school graduation, Vale developed a persistent cough and a pain deep in his left side. When the symptoms didn’t respond to antibiotics, doctors finally figured out there was a tumor the size of a grapefruit between his spine and his ribs. Surgeons removed the growth, diagnosed as an Askin’s tumor, and left a nearly two-foot-long curved scar below his left shoulder blade. They said most people with the rare form of cancer lived only about eight months. But when Vale came home from the hospital, he did a handstand in the driveway—the staples in his back be damned—just to show everyone he was fine.

That was eleven years ago, and Vale didn’t look like a cancer victim now. He was a strapping 180 pounds and had gone on to become a world-champion arm wrestler in the middleweight class. He survived a second bout with Askin’s and another surgery. He attributed his success in beating the disease to eating a dozen or more bitter apricot pits every day (in addition to praying even more than usual).

When Vale returned to the conference room, Harnisch said she wanted to talk about his spam email operation.

“My forte,” he smiled.

“To your knowledge, do you have a reputation in the Internet community?”

She was leafing through several pages of web page printouts. They were Nanae postings, he assumed correctly.

“I see myself in the newsgroups,” he said.

“Would you say you’re notorious for your spams?”

Vale’s lawyer jumped in, saying he objected to the question. But he instructed Vale to answer.

“They’ll do anything they can, they’ll do anything to stop a bulk email,” Vale told Harnisch.

Vale hated the meddlesome anti-spammers in Nanae who whined about his spam to the FDA and the Federal Trade Commission, and he blamed them for getting his sites disconnected by ISPs. Vale also held anti-spammers partly responsible for the lawsuit filed against him in late 1998 by America Online. The online service calculated that it had received over 47,000 complaints about Vale’s spam since December 1997. Many of the junk emails bore phony AOL return addresses.

But Vale was defiant. When AOL dispatched someone to his house to serve him with the lawsuit—the Sunday before Christmas no less—Vale just threw the papers back in the man’s face. After that, Vale completely ignored all of the legal proceedings and went right on spamming AOL members.

Exasperated, AOL’s legal counsel assumed Vale thought he was above the law. A year later, in December 1999, they convinced a magistrate to award AOL $600,000 in damages and a permanent injunction that barred Vale and Christian Brothers from using AOL’s network in the future. So far, AOL’s attorneys hadn’t tried to force him to pay the money. They seemed content just to keep him away from their service.

It was not at all like Jason Vale to walk away from a fight. As a teenager, he had been a master of the preemptive punch. Although it cost him a knocked-out tooth and a twice-broken nose, fighting was so much more effective than trying to reason with someone. But against the anti-spammers, Vale’s pile-driver right wasn’t of much use. He couldn’t get to them. Antis hid behind their computers, using words to jab at him and other bulk emailers. They had taken to calling him the Cyanide Idiot in their Nanae postings, referring to one of the active ingredients in Laetrile. Some even left messages on his answering machine complaining about his spam. Their voices sounded effeminate to him. “Most anti-spammers are gay,” Vale wrote to Frederick, an anti-spammer, in a May 1999 exchange.

A few months before the AOL lawsuit, Vale had annoyed spam-tracking antis with a new technique for driving customers to his sites. Instead of directly revealing the site addresses, such as apricotsfromgod.com and canceranswer.com, in his email ads—which would have made him an easy target for complaints—Vale’s spams encouraged recipients to visit the AltaVista search engine and type the words “apricot seeds” and “cancer.” Because Vale had hidden in his pages’ source code terms like Laetrile, B₁₇, apricot seeds, cancer, holistic, and other keywords, his sites would come out at the top of the search rankings.

Vale’s technique was even cited in an October 1999 article in the Industry Standard, which Shiksaa saw when someone posted excerpts from the article to Nanae. After reading about it, Shiksaa decided to pay Vale a little visit online. She dug up his Cianide70 screen name and contacted him over AOL Instant Messenger.

“Why do you spam, and why are you vindictive against people who complain when you spam them?” she asked.

“You should just hit delete,” replied Vale, not sure who she was.

“I refuse to click delete,” she said. “I will complain about every single spam I get.”

Vale didn’t understand why antis got so worked up about spam, which he considered to be no different than paper-based junk mail.

“There are other more important things in life that one should spend their time concerned with,” he said.

“You didn’t answer my question...why do you spam?”

Vale tried to dodge the question with a rare gesture of peacemaking. “If you want to give me your address,” he said, “I’ll send you a free video and a pound of apricot seeds just cause you were nice.”

“What would I do with apricot seeds?” Shiksaa asked, after thanking him.

“When you see the video your life will be changed.”

But Shiksaa signed off without giving him her address.

By the time Harnisch finally wrapped up the deposition, it was quarter to two. Vale agreed to provide the government with a list of all of his web sites, their traffic stats, and documents showing his income from the Christian Brothers business dating back to 1996.

But on Easter Sunday 2000, before he’d even had a chance to pull the information together, and just as he was getting ready for church, Vale got a call from a Wall Street Journal reporter. She told him the government had convinced a judge to shut him down with an injunction. District Judge John Gleeson had issued an order that prohibited Vale from selling Laetrile, even in the form of apricot seeds.

“What do you think about that?” the reporter asked.

“I respect the court. I respect Judge Gleeson,” he said.

Vale told her he still thought B₁₇ and apricots seeds were not illegal, but he said he would abide by the court’s decision. The next day, he removed the banned products from the ordering sections of his web sites. But he kept the rest of the pages online and added one soliciting donations to his legal fund.

Jason Vale wasn’t planning to give up without a fight.

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

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

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

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

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

The negative feedback was frustrating to Hawke, who had been careful to keep the wheels of e-commerce well greased by soliciting positive comments from bidders. Whenever he shipped out a knife, belt buckle, or any other item to one of his eBay customers, he sent a note requesting that the bidder leave positive feedback for him in the auction site’s forum. In turn, he agreed to recommend the buyer. That way, whenever a potential bidder looked at Venture Alpha’s member profile at the site, they’d see all the positive comments and feel reassured about doing business with him.

But as Hawke’s sales volume grew, the complaints also started to pile up. In late December, a former customer posted a warning to buyers on the rec.knife Usenet newsgroup. “Stay away from these people they are nothing but thieves,” wrote the man. “I won one of their auctions for a set of kamas ... I received the item seven weeks later! They auction things they don’t have in stock and wait until they get your money in hand to order it! The quality of the item was terrible too.”

The same day, eBay unceremoniously suspended Hawke’s account. But he was not about to abandon the business he had come to know so well. So Hawke decided to move up the food chain and start marketing himself as an eBay auction expert. He pulled together some ideas he had seen on the Internet along with some of his own tips into a ten-page document he titled the “The EBay Home Study Course.” Available only in electronic format, it walked beginners though how to choose a market niche and how to write a sales pitch. It also included details on the use of photos to spice up auction listings and advice on setting up a complementary web site. The manual even had a section on why getting positive comments from bidders is important.

“You need to have an outstanding feedback rating brimming with positive comments to really make huge profits on eBay,” Hawke wrote. But he also advised auctioneers on how to deal with what he called “rogue customers” who simply can’t be satisfied. “We all know that the customer is NOT always right...If they persist in causing problems, just ignore them.”

The eBay manual sold fairly well. But a new Hawke venture, which he called the Banned CD, became his cash cow after moving to North Carolina. According to the spams he composed, the CD-ROM contained software programs and “contraband” information that would “teach you things that Uncle Sam, your creditors, your boss, and others just don’t want you to know.”

Hawke loaded the CDs with an assortment of documents he had picked up on the Internet, such as instructions on how to build a cable-TV descrambler and a directory of suppliers of explosives, silencers, and other weaponry. He also threw in a list of twenty-five million email addresses, along with a copy of a spamming program. The CD also contained a number of freeware utilities such as computer screensavers and clip art collections.

For twenty dollars, Hawke considered the Banned CD a bargain, and many customers seemed to agree. But the Banned CD spams also generated more complaints than any of Hawke’s previous offerings.

In June 2000, a flood of Banned CD ads found their way into the email in-box of Reid Walker, who operated a taxi business out of his home in Crestview, Florida.

Walker had recently bought a $250 box called a WebTV that turned his television into a big computer monitor. He could sit on the couch with the unit’s wireless keyboard, dial up the Internet through the box’s internal modem, and look at eBay auctions or check his email between phone calls dispatching rides or handling other business details.

Walker’s WebTV email account had a limited storage quota, and the unit had no CD-ROM drive, so he had absolutely no interest in the barrage of Banned CD ads. More than thirty arrived over the course of a week or two.

After Walker got the first couple of messages, he did the first thing most consumers do: complain to their ISP. WebTV admitted that its spam filter wasn’t 100 percent effective and conceded that individual users couldn’t customize it to block selected spams. There wasn’t much WebTV could do. So Walker followed the instructions at the bottom of the Banned CD ad.

“This is a 100-percent opt-in list...we immediately honor all requests to be removed,” promised the ad. So Walker replied, asking to be taken off the list. But his message was returned as undeliverable. The next day, more copies of the spam arrived, this time with a new return address, and a slightly reworked message:

“And you just had your last chance to stop emailing me,” Walker wrote back, fuming. But once again, his message bounced back undelivered.^[2]

Growing more annoyed by the minute, Walked decided to visit 4publish.com, the web site advertised in the Banned CD spams. He was hoping to locate a phone number or other contact information.

“Remove my email from your distribution list,” he wrote in a customer comment input form on 4publish.com.

But a few days later, in a third salvo, more ads for the Banned CD arrived in Walker’s in-box. Now furious, Walker wrote in the input form at the site, “YOU CAN ALSO BE JAILED FOR SPAMMING! WHICH I AM DOING EVERYTHING I CAN TO GET YOU TRACKED DOWN. QUIT SENDING ME THIS SHIT...IS THAT PLAIN ENOUGH FOR YOU?”

To further drive home his point, Walker sent the message over and over again. He ended up sending over one hundred copies of the message by repeatedly cutting and pasting the text into the form and hitting the submit button.

Without identifying himself, Hawke replied less than an hour later.

“Since you see fit to mail bomb me and harass me like this, I am never, ever, ever going to remove you from this list,” wrote Hawke using the email account [email protected]. “In fact, I am going to distribute your email address and phone number to as many telemarketing companies and spamming companies that I know, who will in turn sell that info to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other direct sales businesses like mine. Have fun!”

And then, a few minutes later, Hawke sent another message: “And no, asshole, I can’t be jailed for spamming. Read the federal laws. It is a civil offense whereby you can sue me for $500 per message. I make $25,000 each weekend doing this. It will cost you more than $500 just to hire a good civil attorney. Go for it pal. I can afford it!”

Walker’s comment about sending Hawke to jail had been a bluff. To his knowledge, there was no federal law prohibiting junk email. But he was astounded by the spammer’s defiance and wondered whether there was a way to combat him. He decided to post a message on Usenet, where he had gotten good advice in the past about fishing and vacation questions.

“Can anyone help?” he asked on June 26, 2000, in a newsgroup called alt.spam.

An anti-spammer named Peter promptly came to Walker’s aid. He looked up the domain registration record for resalehighway.com. Peter told Walker that the site was registered to a Winston Cross in Spartanburg, South Carolina, who listed an email address of [email protected].

On Peter’s suggestion, Walker emailed a complaint to Charter Communications, the cable company that provided Cross’s Internet account, as well as to Blueberry Hill Communications, the California ISP listed in the domain record as the host for resalehighway.com. On both complaints, Walker sent a carbon copy to Cross’s charter.net address.

Peter warned Walker not to expect a quick response and said that ISPs sometimes need to be reminded before they take action. But just the next day, Walker received a terse email from Cross, a.k.a. Hawke. “You’re on the remove list, punk. You won’t receive any more ads,” wrote the reluctantly repentant spammer. Walker was jubilant.

Hawke expected the incident would result in resalehighway.com being shut down. But the site remained online and stayed nearly bulletproof to anti-spammer complaints for nearly a year. It even escaped a nomination to the Mail Abuse Prevention System blacklist. That June, another Internet user who had received Hawke’s Banned CD ads posted a complaint to Nanae. He said that MAPS’s operators had declined his nomination on the grounds that selling spamware was not sufficient reason to blockade the site. In reply, anti-spammer Alan Murphy agreed the site’s IP address should be blacklisted, but he advised the user that there wasn’t much more he could do. “Move on to the next target,” wrote Murphy.

After reading the complaints about MAPS’s inaction regarding resalehighway.com, Shiksaa did some brief poking around at Hawke’s site. She might have put more time into investigating the site and its operator, but the following day a much bigger object appeared on the Nanae radar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Her luck had just run out,” he wrote.

At that point, the Man in the Wilderness somehow found a way to hack into Garst’s PC over the Internet. His first act was to delete the copy of 1^st Class Mail, a program for sending junk email, from her hard disk. Then he downloaded numerous datafiles from the PC “to determine who I was dealing with.”

After studying the files, the Man in the Wilderness determined that Premier Services was apparently being hired by a variety of firms to market dodgy offerings via spam, including college diplomas, credit repair services, government grants, and pornography. According to the hacker, Garst ran the business out of her home in Clarksville, Tennessee, coordinating a handful of associates located around the U.S. Over the course of a couple of weeks, the hacker “spread like a silent wildfire through Rodona’s computer network” and hacked his way one by one into the company’s computers.

“What I wanted,” he explained, “was unrestricted access to the data on their hard drives, and computer by computer I got it.”

The Man in the Wilderness uploaded over six megabytes of the purloined files to his Behind Enemy Lines site, including over two megabytes of log files of online chats between Garst and her five spamming associates. At first, many of the more technical readers of Nanae were skeptical. Something about the hacker’s account of events stuck in their craw. He provided no details about how he had managed to break into Garst’s computer but instead glossed over it with what sounded to them like a Hollywood account of hacking: “I silently came across the Internet from thousands of miles away and hacked my way into the spammer’s computer.”^[3]

But the copious details in the stolen files convinced many that Behind Enemy Lines was not fiction. Included was an incriminating exchange of emails in late 1999 between Garst and a Texas man named Mark E. Rice. The messages discussed a stock pump-and-dump deal under which Garst would be paid $1,500 per million junk emails to send spam touting the stocks of four microcap companies. Rice authored the spams, which typically included fraudulent press releases about the companies and their prospects. Soon after Garst sent off a load of spam, Rice would sell large blocks of the stocks, hoping to profit from the uptick generated by the messages.

“The thing I like about emailing at night is that the rush in the morning is very good for a stock...And if we can keep the momentum going through out the day, we win,” wrote Rice in an October email to Garst The email exchanges also indicated that Garst wanted to reap more from the scam than Rice’s regular payment checks, sent to her via Federal Express. At one point she asked his advice in setting up a brokerage account so that she too could trade shares of the manipulated stocks.

“Since I have an inside of sorts it seems it would be wise if I purchased some stock that we are promoting. Do you have any recommendations?” she inquired.

Rodona Garst puzzled many spam fighters because she didn’t fit their trailer-trash image of spammers. Garst and her associates lived in middle-class neighborhoods in three-bedroom, two-bath colonials. Like other white-collar office workers, they chatted about work, relationships, chocolate, their hair, and family. Shattering that veneer of normalcy, however, were the women’s conversations about ways to defeat ISP spam filters or about places to find pirated (“cracked”) spamware programs. They also freely traded tips on stealing (“fishing”) AOL accounts from gullible users and on fudging their income tax returns.

The Man in the Wilderness acknowledged that the information he found could be quite embarrassing if made public. He also noted that he’d done some soul searching before deciding whether to post the files. But ultimately, he concluded, Premier Services had abandoned its right to privacy by conducting its business so unethically.

“So, without further delay, let’s get brutal!” he wrote.

The Man in the Wilderness proceeded to post revealing photographs of Garst apparently pilfered from her computer. One depicted her from behind in a bathroom, wearing nothing but a T-shirt. The hacker had captioned the photo, “The Number of Freckles on Rodona Garst’s Ass.”

The second shot showed Garst in her office, pulling her shirt up to her chin and baring her chest. “Rodona’s Breast Size” was the hacker’s title. Another set of photos, labeled “A Date with a Spam Queen,” displayed Garst’s business associate, 58-year-old Shary Valentine. The photos showed Valentine posing in corny studio settings wearing a variety of teddies and other revealing outfits. Also included at the site were two erotic short stories also reportedly gleaned from Premier Services’s hard disks.

The appearance of Behind Enemy Lines touched off a new debate in Nanae about the ethics of hacking spammers.

“While that is exactly what we all dream about, the way these spammers’ plugs were pulled is NOT, repeat, NOT the way NANAEites should conduct business,” wrote one newsgroup participant. But some spam fighters, fearing that Behind Enemy Lines might be forced offline, quickly “mirrored” (copied and republished) the site on their own web sites.

One of the first to publish notice of his mirror on Nanae, a Briton named John Payne, soon received email from Garst requesting that he take down the mirror. Payne responded by contacting her over AOL Instant Messenger.

“You do know I didn’t have anything to do with the content, right?” he asked Garst.^[4]

But she still seemed under the impression that Payne was somehow connected to the Man in the Wilderness.

“I intend to follow through with this legally, so any information you have would show your cooperation,” Garst told him.

Payne reiterated that he had no information and that his mirror was just that—a copy of the original site. “I note that you’ve not yet disputed the accusations,” he added.

Garst took nearly a minute to reply.

“An investigator is currently on the case to discover as much information about this as he can,” she said.

Her response puzzled Payne. “About you, or the hacker?”

“The hacker obviously,” she replied. “Direct email is not illegal and most of what he claims my company has participated in is totally off base.”

Payne tried to get her to talk about how she acquired her mailing lists and other aspects of her business, but Garst was evasive.

“Gotta run...so nice to chat,” she typed and signed off.

While Rodona Garst may have been eager to discover the identity of the Man in the Wilderness, anti-spammers seemed reluctant to investigate too energetically.^[5] They were focused instead on a large file lifted from Premier Services and available at the Behind Enemy Lines site. According to the Man in the Wilderness, the 1.5-megabyte file, antifile.zip, contained a compressed archive of addresses of anti-spammers that Garst’s gang was afraid to spam. The company apparently used it to “wash” its mailing lists so that spam fighters wouldn’t receive Premier’s ads and complain. Nanae readers downloaded the file and pored over it, searching for their email addresses among the more than 200,000 listed in the file.

“Wow, this is the first time I’ve been officially ‘honored’ by a spammer. Somehow I feel...dirty,” said a spam fighter named Cynthia upon learning that she made the list. “I’m so proud, one of my spam-fighting addresses made the list, but none of my spam traps,” wrote another Nanae participant, who, like many anti-spammers, had signed up for email accounts specifically in the hope that they would provide fodder for abuse reports.

Others saw the list as a sure sign that junk emailers were fearful of anti-spammers. “Someone went to a lot of effort to put together that list. If fighting spam was as ineffective as people claim, no one would go to the effort,” was the conclusion of one anti-spammer.

Although Shiksaa had only been in the spam wars for little over a year, her AOL and Hotmail email addresses both made Garst’s anti list. She realized that many of the addresses apparently had been compiled simply by harvesting Nanae addresses; even emails belonging to retired spammer Sanford Wallace and spamware vendor Andrew Brunner made the list. And a good portion of the roster seemed to have been compiled from previous compendiums of anti-spammer addresses and was thus out of date. Shiksaa’s newest email, [email protected], which she had been using on Nanae since February, was not included. (She was given the account at Etherboy.com as a gift by its administrator, Dave Lugo, an admirer and longtime spam fighter.)

As a further sign that Shiksaa had become a veteran spam fighter, she was invited to join #Nanae and #Lart, two Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels where anti-spammers could more privately trade quips and information. While Usenet had little of the immediacy of in-person conversation, IRC was often confusingly fast-paced, with comments from participants scrolling dizzyingly down Shiksaa’s screen.

Sometimes, such as occasions facetiously known as Nanae Beer Nights, more than a dozen spam fighters, from all over the U.S. and Europe, would be in the chat room at the same time. It was on IRC that Piers Forrest, a 43-year-old computer technician from England, known on Nanae as Mad Pierre, began doting on Shiksaa. Usually all business on the Nanae newsgroup, Mad Pierre was a master of the humorously flirtatious IRC remark. In August, Shiksaa began using one of Mad Pierre’s more memorable utterances in the signature line of her newsgroup postings: “I worship at the feet of Shiksaa...I’d worship higher up if the straps weren’t so tight.”

While Mad Pierre was not alone in his hyperbolic adoration—several of the male members of Nanae had jokingly been referring to her as the Spam Goddess—Shiksaa particularly enjoyed playing along with Mad Pierre. Once, after a spammer trolled Nanae, accusing antis of having no life, Mad Pierre sarcastically responded that the spammer was correct.

“Damn, you’ve got us bang to rights. We have no lives. None. At all.”

To which Shiksaa responded, “Your life is the worship of moi.”

But because of her investigative skills and dedication to anti-spamming, Shiksaa continued to be a magnet for harassment from bulk emailers, who sought her out on AOL Instant Messager (AIM) or anonymously posted insults about her on Nanae. While she could handle the occasional run-in with kooks, Shiksaa was livid over a stunt pulled by Brunner in the late summer. As part of her self-education in the ways of spamming, she had downloaded a demo copy of CyberCreek’s Avalanche spamware program. Her plan was to install and test it out. But as she was skimming the ReadMe file that came with the software, Shiksaa froze.

Near the bottom of the document, which invited users to contact CyberCreek with questions or suggestions, was a section called the Net-Nazi Hall of Shame. Below a disclaimer that stated that he was not responsible for “actions/misdeeds committed unto the following persons or entities,” Brunner had listed Shiksaa’s first name and her phone number. Beside them, Brunner had added an appeal to all the hundreds of spambags who would install his program: “If you have her address please drop us a note, as she is going to be the first Net-Nazi to be held accountable in a California civil court for defamation.”

The spam goddess was now a target.

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

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

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

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

“I was not prepared for the results,” wrote Catts. “Everyday for the last six weeks, my post office box has been overflowing with five-dollar bills. I am stunned by all the money that keeps rolling in!”

But soon Catts received something else in his mailbox: threatening notices from several states’ attorneys general. Catts was forced to abandon the chain-letter scheme, but he was hooked on the spamming business. Soon he had installed four computers in his home office on Richmond Street, just a block off I-49 and the railroad tracks in the center of Shreveport, and was pumping out spam for items ranging from software and cigars to condominiums and cruise trips.

One night in late 1999 Catts was watching TV in his living room. His 12-year-old daughter was asleep in the room he kept for her when she lived with him (Catts was divorced in 1991).

The phone rang. It was some guy who said his name was John. He said he was sick of receiving junk emails from Catts, and he was on his way over to Catts’s house with a friend.

“Me and my buddy Junior here, he’s an awful mean drunk ... he’s been drinking all day.”^[6]

“And what are you trying to do now?” Catts asked.

“We’re trying to get to your house. We’re going to come down and whup your damned ass because you’re sending all this shit email to us.”

Catts rode bulls professionally for two years. He might have been short, but he grew up in the tough town of Cedar Grove in Caddo Parish and never lost a fight in his life. Still, he didn’t want two drunken rednecks showing up at his doorstep.

“I aint sent nothin',” he said.

“Every God damned time I get on, I got fourteen fuckin’ emails and I’m sick of this shit,” John shouted into the phone.

“Well, I don’t know who you’re getting it from,” said Catts, his tenor voice rising.

Then Junior’s voice came over the line. It was louder and clearer than John’s, as if he was on another phone. He didn’t have John’s southern accent either.

“Take a right. Take a right!” Junior stuttered into the phone.

Catts had an idea. “Does it say it’s from Bubba Catts?” he asked John.

“No, it’s got some bogus email address on it. Every time I try to reply to it...”

Bubba cut in. “Have you tried Jon Scott? He’s the one does my bulk mailing for me.”

John paused, as if taking in the information. “So, you don’t do it yourself?”

“No, I pay him to do it.”

Junior interrupted again. “Take a left. Take a left on Maryland.”

“Are we anywhere near your house?” John asked Catts.

Maryland Avenue was just two streets over from Richmond. “You don’t want to come over here, I’m telling you right now,” warned Catts.

“Why not?”

“Because the sheriff lives next door. My little girl is here. And I will go next door and get him,” said Catts rapid fire.

“Oh, well, you might have to,” said John, a note of bemusement in his voice. “Because Junior here wants to whup somebody’s damn ass.”

“He don’t want to come in this house, unless he wants to go to jail,” said Catts.

“Junior, you don’t care about going to jail, do you?” asked John. “He’s been wanting to whup somebody’s damn ass, and you’re the only one I could think of tonight.”

“Oh yeah, go get ‘em,” said Junior.

“We’ll be there in a minute,” said John. “You better have more than him, because there’s at least two of us comin’.”

“Well...well, that’s fine,” said Catts.

“O.K., here’s Richmond!” shouted Junior. “Go! Go fast!”

Bubba hung up the phone, so he couldn’t hear the chuckling on the other end of the line. He had just been the victim of a spam fighter’s version of the TV program Candid Camera. A few weeks later, a recording of the conversation appeared on the Internet, joining other crank calls made to junk emailers at a site called Spammers Speak.

When anti-spammers heard the recording, they cackled with delight. Shiksaa especially enjoyed Catts’s attempt to redirect the good old boys’ wrath at Jon Scott. She’d had several encounters with Scott, who sold mailing lists containing millions of email addresses. One morning the previous year he had sent her an ICQ message that stated, “Let’s get naked.” Shiksaa forwarded the note to the Internet service provider that hosted Scott’s web site, and requested that the ISP advise Scott to stop harassing her. Then, in an open letter on Nanae, she responded to his advances.

“You are on some serious psychiatric drugs if you would even think I would have any interest in seeing you naked, much less being in the same room with you,” Shiksaa wrote.

Scott, a 40-year-old resident of Chico, California, seemed hurt by her response. He posted this reply: “Many of the people in this newsgroup have anger control problems. They have so little power and control in their own lives that they try controlling others...Susan, you have my deepest love and sympathy. May God bring calmness to your angry soul.”

But Scott’s attempt to take the moral high ground was short-lived. A few weeks later, he sent out a batch of spam that included Shiksaa’s username, along with that of anti-spammer Frederick, in the headers. The messages advertised a home-based business opportunity. Technically, it wasn’t a Joe-job, since Scott had added after their usernames the network [email protected], a service on which neither spam fighter had accounts. But Frederick was unable to ignore the veiled attack. He fired off a note to the Federal Trade Commission, requesting that it investigate what he considered Scott’s attempt to defame him and Shiksaa.

But Shiksaa had much bigger fish to fry.