Spam Kings (3 page)
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This detail first reported by Erik Hedegaard in "Rise and Fall of the Campus Nazi"
(
Rolling Stone
, 14 October 1999, p 81).
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In a May 2004 telephone interview, Hawke revealed that Jeff Krause, executive vice
president of the American Nationalist Party, was the only member of the ANP who showed
up at the march.
From skimming old Nanae messages, Susan Gunn learned that anti-spammers were flush with
power when she found the newsgroup in early 1999. They had rallied to force Sanford Wallace,
the Internet's biggest spammer, into retirement just the year before. Wallace, who was head
of Philadelphia-based Cyber Promotions
, had emerged as a spam king in 1995 and boasted that his firm generated
twenty-five million junk emails per day on behalf of clients ranging from pornography sites
to spam-software vendors. By some estimates CyberPromo.com was responsible for 80 percent of
the spam on the Net.
Unlike most spammers who chose to remain in the shadows, Wallace, a large man in his
early twenties, regularly tangled with junk email opponents in Nanae discussions. Wallace
argued that he was an entrepreneur and that spamming was his First Amendment right. Although
he disliked being called a spammerâhe preferred to say that he was in the bulk email
businessâWallace eventually embraced the nickname given him by anti-spammers: Spamford. But
while they may have admired his chutzpah, Nanae
regulars abhorred Wallace's business practices, which included falsifying the
return address on his spam messages, so that he wouldn't have to deal with complaints or
bouncesâthe error messages returned by mail systems when they received an undeliverable
message.
Anti-spammers cheered in late 1996 and early 1997 when Wallace was hit by successive
lawsuits from a dozen ISPs. The litigation sought to establish some legal guidelines in what
had previously been uncharted waters. AOL argued that it was not obligated to deliver email
solicitations to its members from spammers such as CyberPromo. EarthLink alleged that
Wallace had violated state and federal business laws by incessantly spamming its
subscribers. EarthLink's attorney, Pete Wellborn, a former college football star turned
high-tech lawyer, said CyberPromo was guilty of electronically trespassing on EarthLink's
mail servers with its spam.
When Wallace hired a team of lawyers and announced he would fight the lawsuits, an
anonymous vigilante decided to take matters into his own hands. He hacked into the Cyber
Promotions web site and rummaged through the server. The attacker, who came to be known
simply as Hacker-X
, gathered up a trove of information, including Wallace's customer list and the
administrative password to the machine. Using a stolen account at a university, Hacker-X
then posted the information in a March 19, 1997, message to alt.2600
, a newsgroup frequented by fans of the hacking magazine
2600
. In confessing to the break-in, Hacker-X wrote that he was tired
of the flood of junk email from Cyber Promotions.
"Nobody else was fighting back ... So I decided to kick them and their clients in the
balls," wrote the unidentified intruder. "This won't end. Ever. Myself and others will
continue to expose spam operations weaknesses. To those who think that spam is a good idea:
think again."
Using the opening created by Hacker-X, over the course of several days in late March,
other unidentified hackers repeatedly replaced the regular home page of Cyberpromo.com with
ones of their own design. One version of the defaced page featured an image of a can of
Hormel SPAM, a hyperlink to a page containing a list of customer accounts, and the words
"CYBERPROMO ... NOT JUST BULK EMAIL ... it's SPAM."
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Wallace was furious. He issued a press release that offered a $15,000 reward and
announced that he had alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about the intrusion.
But Wallace's response only seemed to add fuel to the conflict. On April 6, Hacker-X struck
again. He posted another message to alt.2600, taunting Wallace ("that low-life, degenerate,
festering pile of goo") and offering up more purloined information, including technical
datafiles required to provide Internet service to scores of other sites connected to Cyber
Promotions.
A few weeks later, the battle escalated. Someone on Nanae suggested anti-spammers join
in a "Cinco de Mayo Cyberpromo Mailbomb Day
," during which participants would coordinate a variety of attacks on Wallace's
web site and email server beginning May 5. Similar calls to electronic arms were published
in other newsgroups, including misc.consumers, an online bulletin board for discussing
product reviews and other information about consumer issues.
When the so-called cyber-doomsday arrived, Cyberpromo.comâto the surprise of no
oneâsuddenly became unreachable by web surfers. Two days later, Wallace issued another press
release, stating that his company's network was under attack by anti-spam hackers who had
also targeted an Internet router operated by Apex Global Information Systems
(AGIS)
, the Michigan ISP used by Cyber Promotions. The announcement said Cyber
Promotions was in the process of tracking the criminals, whom Wallace vowed to report to
federal authorities.
Wallace never found the hackers. But in apparent retaliation for the attacks, he
registered a new web site, NetScum.net. It contained an online directory with the names,
email addressesâand in some cases home street addresses and phone numbersâof hundreds of
spam fighters and other Internet users who had complained about Usenet postings and junk
email or were otherwise deemed too strident in their requirements that other Internet users
practice good online manners, or "netiquette."
The NetScum directory
was actually a reincarnation of a site created by unidentified Internet users
in 1996 and briefly hosted on a succession of obscure web pages. Among the entries in the
new edition was one on Afterburner
, the respected Erols abuse-desk manager whose true name was revealed at the
site as Michael A. Hanks. (In one of his first acts at the ISP, Afterburner had convinced
Erols to cancel Wallace's accounts there to protect the company's reputation.) In an attempt
to discredit Afterburner, NetScum's anonymous editors had dug up and reposted messages from
1996 by Afterburner's girlfriend to a Usenet newsgroup named alt.sex.bondage. The postings
discussed her kinky sexual activities with what she referred to as her "master" Afterburner
and invited readers to visit her web site dedicated to "BDSM," or
bondage/domination/sadomasochism. Although Afterburner laughed off his NetScum entry, he
became an infrequent contributor to Nanae after the incident.
The computerized attacks on Cyber Promotions and its ISP continued unabated throughout
the summer of 1997, leading some Nanae regulars to grow alarmed at the new trend toward
electronic violence by anti-spam vigilantes. Bill Mattocks, the recipient of a Golden Mallet
Award, argued that the spam wars must be fought ethically, with tactics that kept
anti-spammers on the moral high ground. On August 8, 1997, Mattocks, the operator of a
computer-consulting firm in Wisconsin, posted a four-page note to Nanae with the subject
line, "HACKERS, WISE UP!" In the message he noted that anti-spam crusaders had successfully
built a nonviolent grassroots movement opposed to junk email.
"We're gaining converts who are not technically proficient with computers, but they are
on the Internet, and they hate spam, too. They are our allies. We must reach out to them and
teach them to teach others," wrote Mattocks. He argued that the spam war was as much a
public relations fight as anything and chided Nanae readers who had used the information
from Hacker-X to attack Wallace.
"Shame on you," he wrote. "You are going to bring discredit on the rest of the
anti-spammers. STOP IT!"
Mattocks's advice went largely ignored. The very next day, an unidentified person hacked
into NetScum.net and replaced its usual home page with lewd messages about Wallace and Phil
Lawlor, the chief executive officer of AGIS, Wallace's ISP. The site went offline shortly
thereafter, returned in its original form a few months later, and then went dark again for
good in the middle of October 1997, when AGIS cut off service to Cyber Promotions, citing
the constant attacks from anti-spammers. Six months later, after failing to line up a new
ISP, and finding himself hamstrung by legal settlements with ISPs that forbade him from ever
again spamming their members, Wallace announced his retirement.
In an April 1998 note on Nanae, Wallace apologized for his past actions and said that
newsgroup participants, in particular Mattocks and a popular anti-spammer named Jim
Nitchals, had earned his respect. "It is now clear to me that most of you *are really here*
to stop spam - not just for the thrill ride...BOTTOM LINE: You folks are WINNING the war
against spam."
With Wallace vanquished, anti-spammers turned their attention to smaller foes, whom they
jokingly referred to as chickenboners. Unlike big operators such as Wallace who incorporated
their businesses and maintained office space with hired employees and other trappings of
legitimacy, chickenboners were imagined by spam fighters as living in mobile homes with a
personal computer on the kitchen table, surrounded by beer cans and buckets of take-out
fried chicken.
Veteran spam fighters tended to dismiss the skills of chickenboners, but Gunn was taking
no chances when she finally decided to join the ranks of anti-spammers in early 1999. Her
first move was to create a new screen name under her master AOL account, which was based on
a permutation of her real name, to protect her true identity. "Shiksa" was her first choice.
A few years back, the mother of a Jewish man Gunn had been dating called her that when the
woman thought Gunn was out of earshot. It was a derogatory Yiddish term used to describe
non-Jewish females, but Gunn liked the name. When she tried to sign up for Shiksa at AOL,
however, it was already taken. So she added an extra letter, and "Shiksaa
," her new anti-spam persona, was born.
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The first use of the term "spam" to refer to junk email and Usenet messages appeared
in April 1993, after an incident involving a program called ARMM (Automated Retroactive
Minimal Moderation). Created by Richard Depew, a system administrator in Ohio, ARMM
accidentally posted 200 copies of the same message to the news.admin.policy newsgroup on
March 31, 1993. In response, an Internet user in Australia compared the ARMM incident to
a comedy routine from the British television series
Monty Python's Flying
Circus
. First broadcast in 1970, the sketch features two customers at a
café who discover that every item on the menu includes Hormel's SPAM canned meat. At one
point, a group of Vikings enters and loudly sings a song about "spam, lovely spam,
wonderful spam," drowning out the café customers' conversation.
While most of South Carolina was bracing for the impending arrival of Hurricane Floyd on
September 15, 1999, Davis Hawke was calmly surfing the Internet from Chesnee. The hurricane,
packing 130 mile-per-hour winds at sea, was expected to make landfall on the Carolina coast
that evening. Governor Hodges had ordered the mandatory evacuation of four coastal counties,
causing a massive snarl of cars on I-26, the state's biggest highway. Over half a million
people sought higher ground ahead of the forecasted damaging winds, heavy rain, and
widespread flooding.
A category three storm like Floyd could easily level a flimsy structure like Hawke's
rented mobile home. But he was staying put. Chesnee was two hundred miles from the shore,
sheltered in the southern foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As evening approached, wind
gusts occasionally rattled the trailer's sheet-metal siding, and sporadic sprinkles of rain
drummed on the metal roof. But the power and phone service remained on as Hawke logged onto
InnovaNet, an ISP in nearby Clemson. Hawke had recently signed up for the service under a
new pseudonym, James Kincaid.
Hawke had been spending a lot of time in the trailer since the disastrous rally in
Washington, D.C. In recent days, as fall classes resumed at Wofford College, he'd managed to
resist a strong seasonal force akin to what migratory birds must experience each autumn. For
fifteen years he had found comfort in the cyclic back-to-school ritual. But this year Hawke
stayed hunkered down in his trailer, working mostly on his eBay
auctions.
Even if he hadn't renounced Wofford, there was no way Hawke could fund a return to the
college. His mother had threatened to leave his father unless he completely cut Hawke off
financially. So now Hawke was forced to live off his dwindling savings and the income
generated by his remaining stock of Nazi knives, buckles, and other paraphernalia.
Meanwhile, the college was sending him notices about paying last spring's tuition. And a
bank in Spartanburg was on his case for a nearly $5,000 credit card bill. Hawke was a month
shy of his twenty-first birthday, and already his credit was nearly shot.
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To help with the finances, Patricia was working as an assistant at a karate studio in a
Spartanburg shopping plaza. That left Hawke alone in the trailer most afternoons. It was a
bit like his high school days, when he would come home from school and read or go online for
hours. His mother used to beg him to get outside for fresh air or to call a friend to play
tennis. But aside from weekend chess tournaments, Britt, as his parents called him, rarely
ventured out and instead spent much of his free time on the Internet. Sometimes he'd play
chess with other Internet users, but mostly he was surfing the Web or hanging out in chat
rooms. When his mother would came and checked in on him, Britt quickly pushed the Alt and
Tab keys to bring up a chessboard screen.
Peggy Ambler Davis Greenbaum had no reason to be suspicious of her son. Throughout his
childhood, Britt never needed disciplining. When he was an elementary and middle school
student in rural Lakeville, Massachusetts, teachers singled him out, praising him for both
his schoolwork and his chess. ("The next Bobby Fischer!" they'd exclaim.)
Teachers didn't realize that in their efforts to motivate other students to be like
Britt, they had incited some to hate him. Kids detested his braininess, his pretty-boy
looks, and his Jewish last name. A shy child, Britt was an easy target for teasing and,
eventually, physical abuse, although he never reported it to his parents. Once in sixth
grade when he was in his room changing, his mom noticed scratches and bruises all over his
back. When she forced him to explain, he told her bullies had thrown him over a chair. The
next day his mom marched Britt into the principal's office to complain. But the principal
only made her more furious.
"Tell Britt to fight back," he advised, "and if he manages to beat up the kids, take him
out to dinner to celebrate."
There were no celebratory dinners. Instead, Britt's parents moved the family to
Westwood, a suburb of Boston they hoped would have fewer rednecks. The strategy worked. In
the more affluent town his last name and scholarship were much less conspicuous. But as
other Westwood High students were being drawn into sports or social events after school,
Britt was rereading Hitler's
Mein Kampf
or wandering the Internet's
back alleys, where he discovered white-supremacy web sites.
Now, after shuttering his own neo-Nazi web site and email accounts, Hawke had lost
contact with his former comrades. The trailer was still loaded with Nazi gear, but it no
longer had such a powerful effect on him. He still liked to carry around his SS dagger, but
he never wore the uniforms anymore. Most of the Nazi items had just become eBay
inventory. The stuff practically sold itself, and he completed around a dozen
successful auctions every day. Yet Hawke quickly grew weary of the labor involved. He
calculated that selling a swastika pin that netted him five dollars in profits easily
consumed half an hour of his time, if you figured in exchanging emails with prospective
buyers, packaging and shipping, and the occasional hassles over collecting payments. He
could be making that kind of money working retail at the Spartanburg mall.
Fortunately, Hawke had stumbled upon an easier way. Around Labor Day, he received an
email at his Yahoo! account advertising an Internet marketing kit. For ninety-nine dollars,
Hawke could buy Stealth Mail Bomber
âa software program for sending emails in bulkâalong with a mailing list of one
million addresses, and a manual about selling on the Internet.
As he read the ad, Hawke brightened. The most effortless way to do e-commerce, he
realized, would be to sell digital rather than physical goodsâproducts such as software or
electronic newsletters and books that could be marketed and delivered over the Internet
without any heavy lifting. Hawke visited the web site listed in the message and ordered the
kit using his nearly maxed-out credit card. The next day, an email arrived with directions
on how to copy the kit from an Internet site.
After downloading and unpacking the files, Hawke skimmed the manual. As he expected, it
was thin on contentâjust a twenty-page Microsoft Word document full of e-business platitudes
the author had probably cut and pasted from a web site or cribbed from a booklet off a
supermarket rack. (As Hawke had hoped, there was no copyright notice or even the author's
name anywhere in the document.) Stealth Mail Bomber, on the other hand, appeared packed with
features, although it was a bit confusing. And the address list intrigued him. As he
scrolled through the seemingly bottomless file, Hawke did some quick calculations. If he
could sell the manual to just 1 percent of the people for, say, twenty dollars, he'd make
$200,000 on his hundred-dollar investment.
Television news reports that evening said Hurricane Floyd was whipping Hilton Head
Island and other coastal towns with several inches of rain per hour and winds over sixty
miles per hour. Something about the approaching storm spurred Hawke to move ahead quickly
with his new venture. He surfed to the Network Solutions web site and registered a new
domain, WebManual2000.com. When prompted for his name, Hawke listed James Kincaid, although
he provided his real Spartanburg post office box as the mailing address as well as his own
phone number. He also made arrangements online with Interspeed Network, a California ISP, to
host the WebManual2000 site on its servers.
The next day, Floyd swerved up the coast to North Carolina, sparing South Carolina major
damage. The sun was shining in Chesnee as Hawke began designing the WebManual2000.com site
using Netscape Composer, a program for writing hypertext mark-up language (HTML), the code
used to display web pages. In his haste he didn't realize he had neglected to update the
author setting on Composer's preferences menu since creating the Knights of Freedom site. As
a result, buried in the code of the new site was one of Hawke's former aliases: Walther
Krueger, a German officer decorated in World War II. Hawke intentionally borrowed one
feature from KOF.net: a special order form with which shoppers could input their name, email
address, phone number, and credit card information. When they clicked a button, the
information would be sent from WebManual2000.com to a new email account he set up for the
business:
[email protected]
.
A few days later, WebManual2000.com was almost ready for business. Then came the most
important part: composing an email ad for the manual. He decided to sell the Web Manual for
$19.99, taking a no-hype approach that borrowed much of its language from the original
message he had received for the kit:
I know what you're thinking, another cheap sales pitch, another scam. There are
hundreds of "get rich quick" schemes on the Internet and you're probably convinced this
is just another fraud. But if you've gotten this far, please read on. The information
that I'm selling is not going to make you rich overnight, and you won't be passing Bill
Gates in a Porsche next week. But you WILL learn the most important money-making skills
in the world today: Internet marketing and sales...
On the following Saturday night, Hawke finally had all the pieces in place. With
Patricia watching over his shoulder, he fired up Stealth Mail Bomber. He configured the
program to use "Learn How to Make $1,000,000 In Six MonthsâGUARANTEED!" as his message
subject line. Then he signed on to the Internet and, with a smile at Patricia, clicked the
program's start button. They went to bed while the program slowly churned through his
mailing list.
Hawke awoke early the next morning, eager to learn the results of his mailing. He was
annoyed to find that his computer had somehow disconnected from the Internet during the
night. According to the status window on Stealth Mail Bomber, the program had successfully
sent out just over 108,000 copies of the Web Manual ad before going offline.
Hawke quickly reconnected to the Internet and logged in to the Yahoo! email account to
check his orders. A message in red letters at the top of the in-box page cried out that his
account was over quota and no longer able to accept new messages. It was jammed full of
hundreds of notices from mail systems at AOL and other ISPs, informing him that addresses in
his mailing list did not exist or were otherwise unreachable. Hawke scrolled through the
in-box, hoping for some actual orders, but he could find none. He began deleting the bounced
messages to make way for legitimate email.
After trimming his mailing list to avoid remailing the first hundred thousand addresses,
Hawke started up Stealth Mail Bomber again and began a new run. As the program chugged
along, firing out round after round of email ads, he realized that he'd eventually need a
better-targeted list, ideally one consisting of eBay
sellers or other Internet users who actually had an interest in doing business
online. But he figured he had nothing to lose by sending the Web Manual ad to the rest of
his list. After all, he told himself, sending email was essentially free.
Late the next afternoon, as Hawke was combing through a new batch of undelivered
messages in his Yahoo! in-box, the phone rang.
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Patricia answered it.
"Someone wants to speak with James Kincaid," she whispered with her hand cupped over the
phone's mouthpiece.
Hawke frowned, got up from his desk, and warily took the phone from her.
"Hello?"
"Mr. Kincaid? This is Roger over at InnovaNet," drawled the voice at the other
end.
"Okay ... What can I do for you Roger?"
"It has come to our attention that your account has been used to send out bulk
unsolicited emails."
Hawke paused. "I don't know anything about any bulk emails," he said innocently.
"Well, Mr. Kincaid, we have determined that your account was used to send out the
emails. We have a policy against that," said Roger.
Hawke wasn't sure what to say.
"Have you read our acceptable use policy? It's on our home page," asked Roger.
"Ah, no, I don't believe I have."
"Well, I need to inform you that if this happens again we will terminate your
account."
"Okay," Hawke replied slowly.
"All right then, Mr. Kincaid. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to call.
You have a nice day."
Hawke hung up the phone. He did not like being made to feel guilty, and he was puzzled
by the call. Stealth Mail Bomber's instructions specifically promised that the program
contained special cloaking code that would make it undetectable by the user's ISP. So how
did InnovaNet know he was sending out the ads? Were they tapping his line somehow? He could
have asked Roger, but that would have been an admission of guilt. Hawke decided it was time
to begin shopping around for a new ISP.
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In a February 2004 telephone interview, Peggy Greenbaum told me Hawke signed up for
the credit card as a seventeen-year-old freshman. She said the Greenbaums owe an
outstanding balance to Wofford College for their son's final semester, but they refuse
to pay it because they believe the college essentially forced Hawke to withdraw without
a diploma.
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The outline of this conversation was recounted to me during a January 8, 2004,
interview with an InnovaNet employee.
