Hackers on Steroids (28 page)

These psychos will only do what they know, or think they know, they can get off with. RIP trolling is easy, taking it into the physical world carries many more dangers for themselves. But nevertheless, RIP trolling gives them real confidence, allows them to feel all-powerful in themselves and perhaps buoyed up by such they may then, even if this is just a very, very small number of them, feel as if they can take things a step further, and then a step further again still. The classic image of a serial killer beginning by pulling the legs off insects as a child before progressing on then to ever more and more greater extremes to satisfy his sadistic yearnings is one that should be borne in mind. True online sadism such as that practised by the RIP trolls – aggressive and predatory - should serve as a severe warning if nothing else. I can easily imagine another Brady and Hindley, Manchester’s infamous serial child killers, finding each other through their shared love of RIP trolling and falling in love with one another, reinforcing then each other’s depravities and finding between themselves the power to create their own hell-formed universe where they are the gods and the people of the world mere objects to fulfil the needs of their killing cult as they act to give greater form to their sadism. Because of such creatures as RIP trolls are the Brady’s and the Hindley’s of this world made, and who knows what evil things could take root and grow from the damp soil of the dark land that RIP trolls till together. If such monstrosities are not nipped in the bud before they grow in their minds the idea that they are too strong to be stopped, very bad things may manifest then in the physical world.

And that is one reason why police forces should start to take this whole subculture of predatory RIP trolling much more seriously and seek out and prosecute in any way they can the very worst of the trolls. Australia made a flying start on this front by bringing a severe dose of reality into the life of Bradley Hampson with his extensive fantasies about tortured and murdered children, and very shortly after that bringing to book then too his grotesque admirer Jessica Cook, but ever since then there have been no more prosecutions of RIP trolls down under. In Britain, things have taken the opposite direction, with prosecutions for online remarks under the Malicious Communications Act in 2012 reaching the level of absurdity and threatening a backlash that would serve to let the worst of the offenders escape sanction for their crimes.

Some of the police actions have certainly been fair enough. During the Olympics, 17-year-old Reece Messer received an official police caution after going to the trouble of seeking out on Twitter Olympic diver Tom Daley to send him a tweet referencing his dead father after Daley had failed to win a medal; the tweet itself reading: ‘You let your dad down I hope you know that.’ Not the most extreme example ever of RIP trolling, and Messer seems to be more of a hyperactive imbecile than anything, but he did deliver that remark personally to Tom Daley, along with another threatening to drown him, all of which is harassing speech any way you look at it. A police caution would seem the correct thing to do.

In May, a 15-year-old boy from Norfolk also received a police caution for trolling on a page about Masie Baxter, a 13-year-old girl who hanged herself. The trolling was severe enough to have made the national television news in Britain, but considering the age of the troll a police caution was probably the right choice to make. Hopefully his parents will now get him the psychiatric help that he so clearly needs. In August, 26-year-old Daniel Corcoran from Chorley, Lancashire, was handed a suspended prison sentence over some trolling he done about the murder of two-year-old Jamie Bulger, whose death many Internet ghouls obsessively troll about, with Coss, Duffy, Mello, and Hampson all having at times joined in the ‘fun’ there. Corcoran was said in court to spend 12 hours a day trolling on Facebook. I am not aware what if any pseudonyms he used while doing this, or if he was linked to the same nest of rats that I have had my little adventure with. 

Another police caution was handed out in September to the troll who set up a fake Facebook account in the name of the recently deceased 16-year-old Jordan Agar and used it to taunt his mother with in the aftermath of his death. While his mother Bridget demanded that the creature in question be taken to court for the trauma he caused her, the police disagreed and said that they believed cautioning the unnamed 21-year-old man from Burton would suffice. The police believed the very same thing about Sean Duffy in 2009, and look what that eventually led to.

Our old friend Sean Duffy was back in court in March, this time in Scotland to plead guilty to posting a gruesome photoshop of a 16-year-old girl onto her tribute page, something that was seen by distraught relatives of the girl. He had carried out this attack during his 2011 trolling spree. I had hoped that he would have been sent down again and would be doing his time with some Glasgow hardcases who wouldn’t have taken too much of a shine to him considering what he was in for, but instead he got 300 hours community service, again pleading that his autism had made him do it.

Then there are these four cases – out of a selection of similar ones - that in my opinion just make something of a mockery of the argument in favour of jailing trolls at all, while also making it quite a bit harder to laugh at those coming out with dire warnings about the end of free speech in the UK. For how else can punishing people for trolling be justified if not to offer some justice for people who have been harassed and attacked for no other reason than they are vulnerable to such? None of these cases, though, were about any such thing. The first is that of Liam Stacey, a 21-year-old university student from Wales who tweeted some offensive and racist remarks relating to the collapse of English Premier League footballer Fabrice Muamba during a match. Stacey was drunk in the pub when he done this, and while a right dick he surely was being, the remarks were made on his own Twitter account and were hardly the actions of a determined sadist out to cause further misery to those affected by the footballer’s sudden collapse, or a very real racist trying to incite a pogrom against black people. Unfortunately for him though, the remarks were re-tweeted all the way around Twitter, causing outrage among many in Britain and leading 10 days later to Stacey being given a 56 day prison term for a ‘racially aggravated offence.’ The judge said this was to ‘reflect the public outrage’ at his drunken tweeting, which to me conjures up images of a roaring mob armed with flaming torches and pitchforks (or, if you like, Twitchforks) standing outside the courtroom to ‘make sure’ the judge hands out the ‘correct sentence’ to the accused.

Stacey later said during a TV interview for Wales’s ‘Week In, Week Out’ program that he hadn’t even heard of Internet trolls before he himself was branded as one after his jailing, pointing out that he wasn’t getting up in the morning day after day with the intention to do what he done, unlike some actual Internet trolls. One of those trolls who had been getting up every day to do his trolling is one who is from the same area covered by the South Wales Police that were so quick to charge Stacey. This troll is 43-year-old Darren Burton, aka the infamous ‘Nimrod Severn’ who appeared on the television screens of millions to admit his RIP trolling and to mock even the thought of going to jail for it. Burton was, at least up to his appearance on TV in early 2012, one of the most prolific RIP trolls the Internet has ever seen, and as vile and evil as any of the rest of them. The police had visited him in late 2010 after I sent them screencaps of the very worst of his almost daily RIP trolling attacks on memorial pages, but even though he admitted it all to them they decided to lightly smack him on the wrist and advise him to ‘get a new hobby.’ Burton gloatingly messaged me on Facebook that same night to inform me of this, boasting that the police had given him ‘a license to troll.’ And indeed they may as well have, for Burton – shock and horror - ignored their advice to ‘get a new hobby’ for himself and went straight back to seeking out RIP pages on which to write sexual fantasies about the bodies of the deceased people that they were about. And even after the BBC tracked him down in February 2012 and broadcast his furious admission to millions, still the police didn’t charge him with any offence. The difference between the actions of this dedicated RIP troll sadist and those of the drunken idiot Liam Stacey could hardly be greater. Yet only one of them faced court for his actions, and that is indeed a true travesty. Some cops have given me the impression that they think the whole ‘torturing of the grieving on the Web thing’ to be nothing more than Internet high jinks that they can’t be wasting their time with. Fun and games. 

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If nothing else, Stacey’s case should be a warning to all to never, ever drink and hard drive. Drinking and hard driving ruins lives.

Then in October came the jailing of Matthew Woods, 19, for 12 weeks after he made some sick ‘jokes’ on his own Facebook profile about a missing five-year-old girl by the name of April Jones; with 18-year-old Sam Busby being handed a suspended prison sentence the following month for similar ‘jokes’ made about the same missing girl, and again on his own personal Facebook page. Now, as much as I despise those who seek out the families of dead or missing children to make ‘jokes’ at them about their tragedies, these two characters only made the comments on their own Facebook pages, Woods doing so while drunk. This isn’t the same thing, not even nearly, with the irony being that the family of April Jones would never even have heard of Woods and Busby and their ‘jokes’ should they never have come to court for making them on personal Facebook profiles which the girl’s family members were never likely to view. In cases like these it’s better to let people in their social networks make the judgement on them, surely (and indeed Woods had to flee from an angry mob who visited his house in the wake of the comments).

Another stupid abuse by the police of the Malicious Communications Act occurred again in October when 20-year-old Azhar Ahmed appeared in court to be given 240 hours community service for some comments he had made, again on his own Facebook profile, two days after a bomb attack in Afghanistan that killed six British soldiers. Wrote Ahmed: ‘People gassin about the deaths of Soldiers! What about the innocent familys who have been brutally killed. The women who have been raped. The children who have been sliced up! Your enemy's were the Taliban not innocent harmful [sic] familys. All soldiers should DIE & go to HELL! THE LOWLIFE F****N SCUM! Gotta problem. Go cry at your soldiers grave and wish him hell because that's where he is going.’

The mother of one of the dead soldiers read his words and reported him to the police, but she only saw his comments in the first place because someone who was on his Facebook friend list took a screencap of them and posted it onto a Facebook page that had been set up in memory of the soldiers. But this was hardly Ahmed’s fault, and it was even acknowledged in court that he took the posting down from his profile after seeing the anger which it had caused. I see in it nothing more than someone expressing his political and religious views, even if they are liable to offend many. It actually dazzles me that he was hauled up to court for writing that, especially as it was on his own personal Facebook space. Ironically, it is having grown up in Northern Ireland, without doubt the most spectacularly bigoted and hate-filled little state in Western Europe, that has learned me and many others to be in one way tolerant of widely opposing viewpoints, even when they are vulgarly expressed. For if everyone in Northern Ireland was to express outrage over hate-filled remarks similar in tone to that one, the whole place and everyone in it would just cease functioning. (Yes, you now have people from Northern Ireland telling you to be more tolerant). Why is Azhar Ahmed’s comment on the supposed final destination of soldiers any worse than the preaching of any established Christian church on how anyone who doesn’t adhere to its dogmas is in danger of eternal torture by the same hellfire? Any society that seeks to prosecute opinions like Ahmed’s being expressed may indeed find itself on the slow road to fascism.

All of those four cases differ widely from that of a Sean Duffy, most especially in the intent contained within them. Unlike some, I don’t see in the prosecutions a nefarious government conspiracy to shut down free speech on the Internet, I just see individual police reacting to public anger and taking stupid and ultimately self-defeating in the wider context prosecutions against easy marks. As opposed to the ‘anonymous’ trolls engaged in dedicated RIP trolling, all of those people were easy to immediately track down and pin stuff on. The triviality of many of the cases being brought led Britain’s top prosecutor Keir Starmer QC to issue new guidelines as to what Internet postings should and should not be grounds for prosecution in England and Wales. Said Starmer in late December 2012: ‘A prosecution is unlikely to be in the public interest if the communication is swiftly removed, blocked, not intended for a wide audience or not obviously beyond what could conceivably be tolerable or acceptable in a diverse society which upholds and respects freedom of expression. The interim guidelines thus protect the individual from threats or targeted harassment while protecting the expression of unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, or banter or humour, even if distasteful to some and painful to those subjected to it.’

I am pretty confident that the targeting of real RIP pages with grotesque photoshops of the deceased along with sexual comments and such-like about the dead person’s body will still be found to fall under ‘harassment’ and not under ‘humour,’ as it would take a psychopath to see such as real humour, and an idiot to believe it nothing more than a genuine attempt at such. Perverting an image of a dead child into something grotesque is its own form of child pornography.