Police Impersonators Set Out To Take Control Of Anonymous By Enlisting Andrew Breitbart In Scheme
Last year, a group of wannabe “info warriors” hatched a plan to set about infiltrating and co-opting the hacktivist group known as Anonymous. As part of their plot, this group intended to social engineer anti-far-leftist media figure, Andrew Breitbart, for the purpose of enlisting him in their rather ill-conceived crusade. The main problem: this group’s members have been, according to evidence and accounts, impersonating local and federal law enforcement officers. This crew are like mall cops (which aren’t even cops), but with even less authority than mall cops.
We’ll never know if Breitbart was going to take up this cause with these future criminals because he passed away in the midst of their communication, but it’s evident that he was communicating with these people. Since Breitbart’s death last year, this group has continued to this day to attempt to realize their goal. Emails sent to Andrew Breitbart near the time of his death explain that this group had a primary focus, and that was to take control of Anonymous. Here’s the pertinent part of the email sent to Andrew that “The Trenches” received June 27, 2012:
ANONYMOUS
a. A Hacker group solicited by Adbusters on IRC in early 2011 for use as a political weapon.
b. Co-opted by the left immediately for political use and frowned upon by the hacker factions therein.
c. Our goal was to:
- Infiltrate Anonymous
- Cause a rift between the left and the hackers by first proving to the hackers involved that they were being used
- Provide them with enough information to ultimately attack the left
- Uncover the mechanics of how the left would filter control of the organization’s money to themselves
BOSTON POLICE & FBI - WHITE HAT GOALS
a. Work with Detective Blair of the Boston Police Department
b. Feed Boston PD information on hacker activity that we are assured trickles up to the FBI
c. Neal Rauhauser’s name has already been dropped to them & being investigated
d. As soon Anonymous arrests began to take place (already in progress), divert blame & tell Anonymous that it was a construct of the left
e. Stand back and watch Anonymous destroy the left themselves
All 3 emails to Andrew Breitbart are here in this Scribd embed (Michelle/Zapem claims authorship):
We sat on these emails until it was clear that this crew were up to no good. At that time, roughly the end of October, we leaked them through a couple of backchannel contacts and their contents made it to other websites like DrumsNWhistles to begin the process of informing the public about this group while we could continue to observe their behavior. Today marks the beginning of exposing this group and their criminal methods, Trenches style.
Note that the emails are from a Vested Protection Systems. There’s not much about them online. Here’s a Yellow Pages entry. Apparently, Jeffrey Joy runs this company out of an office in the same building for another company that he consults for called Freedman CPA.
Jeffrey Joy’s bio on the Freedman CPA website.
Note that Vested Protection Systems and Freedman Accounting Services use the same mailing address.
There’s also an unsubstantiated story that Jeffrey Joy was trying to sell Andrew Breitbart the services of armed security guards (off-duty police officers) for an upcoming NYC trip that Breitbart intended to make. We’ve never seen those emails, but we’ve heard about them from some Breitbart members.
Who are the members and associates of this little gang who wanted to infiltrate and co-opt Anonymous?
Here’s someone who identifies part of the crew in a tweet:
#FF Team USA! @CryingWolfeBlog @ZAPEM @TheTimeShifter @AsherahResearch @TomRyanBlog #tcot #cro
— Patrick S. Read (@SwiftRead) September 29, 2012
That’s Jennifer Emick with the librarian glasses, Michelle/Zapem and dog (unverified photo below, but Zapem claims it’s her), and Tom Ryan. There are other players, but for now we’ll keep it simple and focus on these three.
Emick (@asherahresearch on Twitter) describes herself as a former Anonymous member who outed Sabu. A deeper dive on Emick can be found here. Emick’s associates have also recently outed the identity of an FBI agent in an attempt to harass him for not doing their bidding (this crew tends to conflate civil and criminal matters), further explained in this post. She’s also an obsessive troll where the “patriot hacktivist” known as “The Jester” is concerned. The Jester is known for his DoS attacks against Jihadist groups, Westboro Baptist Church, 4chan, and for participating in the outing of Sabu. (How many people can be known for outing Sabu?)
Tom Ryan is probably best known for pretending to be girls on Twitter to punk the security community. Infosec-styled “Catfish” anyone? Ryan must be proud to leave behind a legacy of sockpuppets which is criminal behavior in some cases. Oh, and he also leaked emails from an OWS mailing list while informing on them to the FBI.
Zapem’s only notable activity prior to this SNAFU has been the trolling of Neal Rauhauser for over 2 years. Here’s why.
Let’s observe Zapem implicating herself in criminal activity while admitting her working collaboration with Emick and Ryan.
Zapem slips up and impersonates a police officer:
In this clip, Zapem blames the Iranians for collaborating with Anonymous and giving them the “tools” they use to launch cyber attacks. She also admits to working with Jennifer Emick (“Ashera” is mentioned here, that is Emick’s online persona) in getting information to the police about Anonymous:
Zapem wants to take information about Anonymous to the FBI. She’s talked to her FBI informant pal, Tom Ryan, about it:
Ex-cop, Jeffrey Joy, whose company email account was used to send the emails to Andrew Breitbart, is also part of this little crew. He’s also the person who threatened to kill me last summer over emails I didn’t have at the time. I wrote about Joy and his death threats in detail here on our Fubar site.
A few months ago, Emick, Zapem, and Ryan recorded a series of calls between Tom Ryan and Chet Uber without his knowledge or consent. Uber is one of the founders of Project Vigilant, a security organization that Neal Rauhauser worked for a short period of time. Adrian Lamo, the guy who fingered Bradley Manning (couldn’t resist the pun Adrian), is also a Project Vigilant member.
Did Emick, Zapem, and Ryan conspire to breach the NC4 Cybercop website that Project Vigilant uses as part of their operational platform as part of their plan to infiltrate Anonymous, or something else? Per Uber, Michelle/Zapem was given access to part of the system where unvetted participants have access after she represented herself as an FBI agent. Uber received a heads-up regarding who Zapem was from a few of his confidants and stated that he gave Michelle access to the system to see what she would do. Uber wouldn’t have to wait long. Recently, Ryan’s crew leaked the Project Vigilant participant information from the Cybercop platform, along with the recorded calls, to another group known as Paranoia. We haven’t determined what the relationship is between Ryan’s crew and the Paranoia group. Among the dumped information is the user account that Michelle used to access the user directory information that was leaked. According to this record, her name is “Michelle Matthews” living in Roseland, New Jersey. Uber says that’s not her real name and he claims to know her identity. We still don’t know her last name, but rumor has it that we’ll have her identity shortly.
(As a brief aside to show how small the world is, NC4’s President and Chairman is Aubrey Chernick, a huge supporter of the Israel lobby, and a primary investor of PJTV (Roger Simon recently stepped down as CEO of PJTV). When PJTV launched, Andrew Breitbart gave a “christening” speech at PJTV’s kickoff party. Andrew and Aubrey were friends.)
How effective has this infiltration crew been? After the information was leaked to the Paranoia group, Ryan deleted his tweets and has gone dark since (@tomryanblog on Twitter). Zapem’s Twitter account was suspended just prior to the leak for numerous Twitter TOS violations which involved stalking, harassment, defamation, and sharing private information. Emick, well, she’s still on Twitter trying to pull off that e-famous thing. Listen to the hysteria as Zapem admits that they’re in over their heads and need the FBI to come and rescue them (shades of William Welna’s (an Emick lackey) recent meltdown). Can you say lulzcow?
Kelly Hallissey (@Bitchiest on Twitter) obtained the unedited recordings of the calls between Ryan and Uber. The recordings on the Paranoia website were edited to remove most of the pre-call chatter between Ryan, Emick and Zapem. In Hallissey’s recording, prior to making of one of the calls, the three can be heard planning their makeshift approach to dealing with Uber on the call. At one point, Ryan asks if he should mention to Uber that he’s recording the call while Zapem and Emick tell him not to mention it. This is another potential crime.
During my phone interview with Chet Uber last evening, he outlined a few possible federal crimes here. He mentioned that Zapem claimed she was an FBI agent in one of their phone calls - something that no one believes and that Uber claims he’s verified isn’t true. Impersonating a federal agent is a very serious crime. There’s also unauthorized access of NC4’s system and dissemination of information which he claims is a violation of federal statutes, based on NC4’s quasi-governmental status. Finally, Uber said that there’s a potential federal conspiracy charge which could be brought against this group for their coordination in the commission of these other potential crimes.
What was the point of this detour with Project Vigilant if Anonymous has been the primary target? There’s much animosity toward Neal Rauhauser from this crew. Uber was likely targeted to put pressure on him to roll over on Neal after Neal’s rather unkind blog posts (since removed) about Chet Uber this fall. Uber and Rauhauser have had a few falling-outs over the years, as both men have stated. More than likely, this crew saw an opportunity to capitalize on Uber’s raw emotions and when he wouldn’t roll over on Rauhauser, they decided to dump the calls and the Project Vigilant user data. Yet another 3rd party has to suffer because of Rauhauser - sure wouldn’t endear Rauhauser to Uber even if it wasn’t directly Rauhauser’s fault. Rauhauser was mentioned right alongside Anonymous in the emails sent to Breitbart. Rauhauser used to work with Uber. Zapem has been stalking Neal Rauhauser for over 2 years. From all appearances, Zapem’s obsession with him was the driving force in this latest fiasco. To date, we’ve never seen any evidence of Rauhauser’s crimes from anyone. At what point does the law of diminishing returns play in correcting someone’s failed course? To this kooky crew of Ryan’s, maybe never. Looks like they’re all doubling-down on poking their own eyes out.
Has Anonymous been co-opted? Not by these paranoid delusional people. Tip: it’s probably not a good idea to poke the hive, especially when you’re nothing but a two-bit snitch.
No matter how loudly, or how often you say that you’re in law enforcement, it doesn’t make it so. Being a former cop (if that’s what Joy is) doesn’t make it so. In fact, making these claims means you’ve committed a crime. Pretending to be cops proves that you’re capable of lying about nearly anything. Pretending to be cops doesn’t give you the right to threaten, harass, or defame people. Pretending to be cops doesn’t give you the right to breach security in an organization and leak their member data. Pretending to be cops doesn’t give you the right to do anything other than… maybe the right to remain silent when the real cops come and arrest you for breaking the law. How ironic the justice will be on that day.
Committing crimes while masquerading as cops? In the words of Tony Montana, “Whoever said you was one?!!”
Bellum Letale
Updated 2/23/2013. What are people saying about this?
The “patriot hactivist” known as The Jester (he ‘s got cred in this area) approves:
As well as Chet Uber, the current director of Project Vigilant (the organization that outed Bradley Manning), who said this earlier today:
