Crack Babies of Kiwi Farms
A digital cesspool that became a national security threat.
The Russians are well known for backing any separatist organization, anywhere, no matter how implausible. A side effect of this is that badly behaved online communities above a certain size have handlers within them, shaping activities. I first encountered this in the spring of 2012, when portions of Occupy Wall Street turned from an economic populist movement into a pitiful Libertarian cheer squad.
The best known among these entities is 8chan, which incubated the Qanon cult. I am quite pleased that I personally landed not just one but two hits on the site’s current operator, Jim Watkins.
A much less well known but far more toxic entity are Kiwi Farms and its companion sites, operated by the original developer of 8chan, Josh Moon.
There have been signs that something was up for the last several weeks. I finally went to Twitter, had a look around, and the origins of the attention are now clear to me. I may or may not explore that in detail, there’s a lot in motion right now.
Attention Conservation Notice:
If you’ve ever non-ironically said “Don’t make me stop this car”, you might want to pass over this recitation of juvenile misconduct.
Origin:
I am not going to do a full back story on Kiwi Farms, the links in the lede should provide you an introduction if you’re not already familiar. We’ll stick to the signs I picked up in my environment.
Each story on this Substack is followed by a list of stories ranked by views. A high traffic article here will reach a hundred views, so it was curious to me to see January 20th’s East Bay Craigslist Scammer rising quickly. It has four times the views of the next most popular piece and I assumed it had been picked up by some counter-fraud forum, or …
… some of the low grade morons that infest Kiwi Farms have decided this is a way to “dox” me. I’m surprised San Francisco Studio Simulacra didn’t get more attention along with it.
Crack Baby #1:
Context matters here. I terminated my @nrauhauser Twitter account with extreme prejudice at the end of March and I’ve ignore various attempts to get me to re-engage.
Three weeks later this stuff starts. This is what I’d call a “word salad” approach. I did not confirm or deny any particular names or events in here and I’m not going to do that now. Suffice it to say this is a relatively low effort approach with the low Apgar score one would expect from a crack baby.
Crack baby #2:
This one shows a lot more forethought. I recommend Pi-hole, so four months ago there’s an article about it.
Interpretation:
Despite putting in orders of magnitude more effort, this one stumbled right out of the gate, too. What’s wrong with Jack Waterloo?
Claims Champaign Urbana, where I’ve been coming and going for the last twenty years.
A younger person in a field similar to mine, and I’m known to enjoy helping newcomers.
Creates plausible back story for how he came to be apartment hunting.
Has the same experience my “friend” did in East Bay Craigslist Scammer.
Looks perfectly plausible, right? But that’s it.
This persona just dropped out of the sky into my old haunts, had to move, like I did, ran into the same scam I did, and then … *crickets*. There isn’t anything older than four months. Every move this account ever made was to parallel my life in some fashion.
Let me add some perceptions that I have. I don’t know her name and I doubt I ever will, but given the time she’s invested in this I’m sure she’ll be back.
Thinking Out Loud:
I got my start in this field via a brief stint with Project VIGILANT and then years of Progressive political activism. Both of these were very permissive, trusting environments. For better or worse, I’m a member of the Anonymous class of 2011 - 2012, and while the culture is vastly different, with lots of paranoia and a pretext of operational security, it was only ever proof against stuff like the approaches you see in this article.
I am often haranguing you guys about technical and operational hardening. If you’re pondering how you would have (not) responded to this, let me suggest two articles from September of 2023 - What Hunts You? and Regarding Your Ass.
There are many things I do that I don’t share. Take a long hard look at Why Microsoft Products Are Trash. I do stuff like that all the time. If it’s not immediately apparent, squint at the first screen shot until you see it.
I made major changes in the summer of 2020 and another last summer. The first network is last summer, when there were still some people connected to “the scene” in my circles. The second is last month. Nobody who doesn’t have a name and a role with an organization is in there. I wrote about those changes in Introspection & Investigation.
Conclusion:
I could have let this just die quietly, as many other pretext approaches do. But the activity in this area would be a really useful field study. The particular things I see are:
There’s a larger scrum that set this in motion, basically @jimstewartson vs Mike Flynn and his “digital soldiers”.
Last year I was made aware of a federal undercover operation aimed broadly at the chan culture online harassment operations, and I’m in the mood to heckle a bit and fuel their paranoia.
This is a good “before” assessment of my world, which is needed, because what I teased in MIOS: Doin’ A FISA is progressing, kinda looks like it’ll hatch in early May.
This environment is not even safe to observe without hardening. If you don’t have a burner phone that has never touched your home or work wifi, if you don’t have a laptop dedicated to use on the burner’s hotspot, if you can’t build a virtual machine with a fail closed VPN configuration … I will suggest that you let the articles here be your sole source of information.