I was going to wait until the firestorm died down a bit to respond. I understand that I have little credibility at this point, and I know a lot of this may be more egotistical babbling, but I am offering this statement for what it's worth.
For the record, I'd like to note that this PlanningAhead individual reminds me of a spammer troll who spammed WITP with many sockpuppet accounts such as 'PlannedAhead', 'PlanningAhead' 'PlanAhead'. It was all we (the moderators of WITP at the time) could do to ban the accounts and delete the spam, and we had to tell the admins (Mavendetta and firstmonkey) to shut down registration because of it.
I had never even heard of this "Project Celestia" before today.
A whole lot of this picture, at least the part of it that isn't COINTELPRO, boils down to inter-chan and inter-Anon politics.
The *chans are the loose-knit collection of communities that spawned as offshoots of 4chan.org. 7chan, 420chan, and 711chan, were the largest among these, but there are dozens of others.
It's true that I was the admin of a website called 888chan.org back in the day, under the username "r3x". That website was actually launched on August 15th, 2008, and the goal of it was to maintain a *chan basis for Project Chanology (Anonymous vs. Scientology). Here I'm going to explain this in Anon cultural terms, so please forgive me for foul language.
NOTE: NSFW!!! _http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/888chan
This political struggle in Anonymous was framed in terms of "hatefag" vs. "moralfag".
Hatefag = Anons who have no qualms about ruining innocent people's lives "for the lulz" or enjoying images of gore, tortured cats, etc. Essentially, pathological types.
Moralfag = Anons who express outrage and disgust at Hatefags, and want to utilize the Anonymous MO as a positive force, as in peaceful hacktivism and protests.
888chan was positioned right in the middle of this kind of "civil war" in Anon culture.
888chan hosted a lot of boards for local Anon Chanology cells. With 888chan, I also had the goal of expanding the scope of this hacktivism from Scientology to other fronts such as Freedom of Information and Net Neutrality.
Now, a curious thing about the rise of 888chan, was that I ended up running interference against those *channers who wanted to destroy those "moralfags" at WhyWeProtest.net (hit it with DDoS, etc.).
I did this in two ways.
1) By playing their raiding/trolling game better than they did, so as to detract users from them.
2) By actively interfering with raids against WWP and warning the WWP staff about impending raids.
There was one particular incident in either September or October of 2008 when users on 711chan.org's /i/ board were planning raids against WhyWeProtest.net. 888chan.org also had an /i/ board at that point. What I did here was an act of "trolling," for a useful purpose. I stated publicly that I was merging the 888chan /i/ board and redirecting it to 711chan's /i/ board, in hopes of an alliance between the two *chans. I knew what would, and did happen as a result: users from 888chan /i/ began spamming 711chan.org's /i/ board with cries of "what the hell is going on?" etc., meanwhile drawing everyone's attention to the fact that 711chan /i/ was planning raids. The result was that 711chan.org said "no more anti-chanology raids", I removed the redirect, and that was the end of that.
During the time that I ran 888chan.org, I also, through an act of subterfuge, managed to get a hold of the database and web files for the "Partyvan Wiki". (partyvan.info) Since the Partyvan Wiki hadn't been featuring any 888chan.org /i/ raids, and I knew 888chan had a lot of good raids to offer, I decided to set up my own wiki, called the Insurgency Wiki. (hosted first at insurgen.cc, then at insurgen.info).
Over time, 888chan /i/ and the Insurgency Wiki began moving more and more into hacktivism raids, such as the Australian Operation Didgeridie. _http://www.anonsa.org/2009/09/operation-didgeridie-and-the-war-on-the-australian-government
I had been paying for the hosting of 888chan.org out of my own pocket, and by late 2009, it became too large, expensive, and unmanageable to continue running it.
That's where this idea for "Project Vibe" or "VibeCraft" started. I'd been a first-hand witness to these hacktivism operations, and noted that it was difficult to keep the culture of such a community active and participating effectively.
The basic idea of VibeCraft (Vibe being a portmanteau of Virtual Tribe) was to design hacktivism communities intelligently, from the ground up. Ideally this would contain all of the necessary facets of the community, such as an imageboard (like the *chans), irc, a wiki, etc., and all hosted on I2P (darknet), with two levels of forced random nicknames. (A random nickname for the user account, a separate random name for each specific operation or event). The community would host no more than 150 active participants at the time (Due to Law of 150, see Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point). Users would be promoted through a points system according to participation, and the entire community would spawn offshoots of itself, before disbanding after roughly 3 months or so. The idea there would be to remove the inherent vulnerability of a hacktivism website always being a target for counterattacks. Or, to design the community as a kind of macro-organism that works according to Darwinian rules of overbreeding to ensure survival and natural selection. I also wanted to design the culture of the community like a sort of game, so that the hacktivism would be a product of rich interaction, and not the sole focus.
Between the time that I got out of the Marine Corps in April 2010, and June 14th, 2011, I had been working on this idea more and more, custom-coding a lot of the features into a python-based imageboard.
So then in June 14th, I just so happened to chance upon a video about WITP on the "Anonymous Victory" group on Facebook.
I jumped on board hardly knowing what it was about, and I was on a rather shoddy internet connection at the time. I applied for a moderator position and got the spot, and from that point, actively began helping to shape the culture of this new community, by making informative posts about the history and the culture of Anon, talking about COINTELPRO, etc.
This is where I made the mistake of including links to LKJ's blog to inform users about COINTELPRO on such sites as Above Top Secret and Godlike Productions.
_http://www.whatis-theplan.org/t1285-cointelpro-is-stepping-up-their-game-let-s-counter-the-counter-intelligence
http://laura-knight-jadczyk.blogspot.com/2006/01/how-to-spot-cointelpro-agents.html
http://laura-knight-jadczyk.blogspot.com/2006/01/cointelpro-updates-above-top-secret.html
Later on, a user on WITP had made a post commenting on how when he attempted to report a UFO sighting to MUFON, they wouldn't take his report seriously. I mentioned to him how MUFON was more or less infiltrated and controlled by gov't agents.
That's when I made the further, monumental mistake, of quoting the frontpage article of the Cassiopaea anti-defamation blog, http://cassiopaea-cult.com/, in a post about MUFON and COINTELPRO. I also linked to the Wave and Adventure series as longer versions of the story told on the anti-defamation blog.
_http://www.whatis-theplan.org/t2418-mufon-and-cointelpro-the-wave-series-and-adventures-with-cassiopaea-series
What I hadn't realized was that the posts I had made on Cassiopaea.org talking about WITP, and the posts I made on WITP talking about Cassiopaea.org, had made me a vector for a COINTELPRO attack to hit two birds with one stone (WITP & Cassiopaea.org).
I also want to state as an aside and a response to the criticism of my having changed usernames so many times before, this is more or less for practical reasons, that one way to maintain anonymity is to change usernames frequently, not draw too much attention, and if one does draw too much attention, to change their nickname. Of course, I knew once I got in to running websites and working on projects (VibeCraft), that these ideas were tied to me, and to speak about them would identify me as r3x. I had also accepted the inherent risk of being identified as r3x, because I had been doxed once before, and I knew I would be re-doxed once the VibeCraft idea began attracting attention.
During the time that I was a part of WITP, I was also participating in behind-the-scenes Anti-Troll and Anti-COINTELPRO work, especially with regard to irc.anonops.li.
We exposed users on AnonOps and elsewhere, such as:
- Shrew,
- AnonTangoDown _http://twitter.com/#!/anontangodown (who was going after Sabu, the leader of LulzSec, and also apparently doxed Mavendetta),
- Xenony/xen0nymous ( _http://www.youtube.com/user/xen0nymous)
- Nederland Vrij (he was mainly on Facebook)
Who were actively "doxing" moderators of WITP and trying to whip up 4chan /b/ and AnonOps irc against WITP.
We finally managed to put an end to all of this when we compiled pastebin profiles on two specific users who were acting like COINTELPRO, and one who was just causing trouble. I myself was more or less directing the compiling of this information, and produced the finished product:
_http://pastebin.com/7C1b2J7e
Mavendetta made a video about the release of that Pastebin:
_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-mnnpkvxFk
All of this was shortly after Operation: Onslaught (July 30th). I had known there would be a torrent of backlash from COINTELPRO and ordinary trolls just because of the attention we had drawn to WITP.
The problem with releasing this Pastebin, however, was that Mavendetta had already been doxed by AnonTangoDown, but the dox had not been released. After we exposed #opplanb, pretty much all hell broke loose, leading to dox spamming of Mavendetta's dox on the WITP forum, someone impersonating me on 4chan /b/ under the username "Telemachos", and then posting the dox of another Anon who was a WITP moderator in the same 4chan /b/ thread.
As a result, Mavendetta started laying low (lost his job and had to try to repair his personal life), and we hardly had admins available to do necessary tasks such as shutting down registration during a sockpuppet spam attack, changing the forum structure, making announcements, etc.
The impersonation trolling, the "dox" battles, and trolling against me of this VibeCraft idea, had all fairly weakened my credibility as a moderator, due to certain other moderators mistrusting me. I could tell by about August 12th or 13th that all of the drama and lack of focus and direction was killing the community, and at that point I was making posts to try and keep morale up. I posted a PM to Mavendetta and firstmonkey, and made it clear in no uncertain terms, that WITP needed more admins to be available online, leading to a community vote on new (additional) admins.
It was also around this time that I noticed the Project Mayhem thread on WITP, and made the Project Mayhem 2012 thread here on the Cassiopaea forum, in this very subforum, in a rather panicked state. _http://projectmayhem2012.org/
To me this Project Mayhem 2012 looked/looks like a slick COINTELPRO vectoring operation against the WITP community. This may not be the case, but I'm just stating this for the record. I understand many have thought the same thing about this VibeCraft thing, but for the record, I never pushed that idea on anyone, always offered it as a suggestion (for an eventual method of decentralization), and presented it in the spirit of brainstorming.
And then, if I recall correctly, my dox were released on Sunday, August 14th. I pretty much lost my mind at that point, and acted very stupidly (I know, I was acting stupidly all along, but this was overboard). That night I first made a post stating that I was resigning, but then later on that night, I retracted my resignation and put myself up for a moderator review. My pseudo-logical, egotistical reasoning to myself was that I still wanted to spark debate within the community, especially with regard to that Project Mayhem 2012 website, as well as conspiracy-related or other controversial subjects.
If there are any details or time periods you would like me to talk about more, please ask or comment.
