J Notes Support and D Convo Walk
j notes
connective tissue
main points
digital takeover continues
dont let the trail run cold
dont let others tell me what i know
democracy depends on confidence
need template to link between technical and plain lang
identify connective tissue, maybe certain points get reworked.
obsidian long form and general doc
so I was thinking about the Dead Internet theory (didnt look into it but remembering what you said)
and how it supposedly started in 2016
reminder to self to dig up my red string board on Vitaliy Opryshko and send you
I think I just made a mental connection between some research I was doing before we met/before it was super obvious Trump wld be back for 2.0
This relates to an early signal I found linking Russia to the U.S. far-right’s digital infra.
We learned in 2021, through one of the largest and most compromising breaches in history at that point in time (entire server images equalling 4TB, entire customer database with plaintext passwords and billing info stored in unencrypted .txt file), that the U.S. far-right’s domain registrar and webhost provider of choice, Epik, was actually run by Russian “devs” for over 10 years. These Russian devs all started their careers building bot armies in the leadup to Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014.
As far as I can tell based on my resarch, Russian propaganda officially hit the digital influence age starting around 2014 to rally global and domestic approval of the Crimea invasion.
One thing the Russian spy (V) said that may very well be true is that there was a lot of domestic dissent against Putin around this time and then invading Crimea really got Russians to rally behing Putin, it was wildly popular and cemented Putin’s hold on power.
So these Russian devs wrote the entire shitty codebase and kept it in a black box where even the American CEO couldn’t access it. We know this because said American CEO gave an absolutely wild 5-hour long livestream addressing the breach and straight up admitted all this. I have a transcript.
Epik is/was responsible for being the last U.S. host for 8chan/kun before they moved to Russian servers. The CEO Robert Monster used the Christchurch massacre to advertise Epik as the most bulletproof mainstream provider for terrorist manifestos and mass shooting livestreams. He’s fucked.
So essentially, we learned that Russia via these offshore devs was the actual owner of the #1 U.S. webhost hosting sites like Daily Stormer, Kiwi Farms, Alex Jones, Gab, Parler (memory fuzzy on this one but pretty sure), 8chan when even Cloudflare deplatformed them, and just every nasty white supremacist or Holocaust denier or straight up mass shooter forum.
Very ironically considering how easy it was for Anonymous to hack them, all these white supremacists were paying for WHOIS anonymity to be able to post their hateful shit without getting fired from their day job. Talk about the ultimate honeypot.
I’m pretty convinced Russia itself was the one who leaked the customer database, after they had gone through the entire list and compromised the American extremists they could, and the names on the list are punishment for those who refused. Ransomware gang style.
Leaks happened Sept-Oct 2021, so not really timed towards mid-terms, but prob having something to do with clearing house post-Jan6.
Regardless of who exactly leaked, it’s public knowledge for anyone who cares as much as I do that Russia has a detailed db of names, address, credit cards, employment, etc of every single American far right extremist influential enough to run their own site.
So, I don’t have some solid theory yet, but I’m thinking the Russian prototyping of their bot army strategy that went live in 2014 and only grew stronger and more sophisticated by 2016 U.S. elections are the foundations of the Dead Internet Theory phenomena.
Epik is shady on so many different fronts, but the end of that chapter is they were being federally investigated for wire fraud and almost lost ICANN accreditation, but at the last moment the shadowy CEO of America’s largest and sketchiest registered agent companies—aptly named Registered Agents, Inc.—acquired Epik. At a time where Epik’s reputation for fraud and massive debt and hate speech and also on ICANN’s shitlist, it would have been cheaper for anyone to start their own registrar than pay millions for the Epik “brand”
Ok not trying to go on a schizo rant but I hope you see there’s a constant thread of Russia’s influence/control of the American radical right that’s been ramping up since at least 2016, based on perfecting techniques that started around 2014 or so.
On the subject of Epik’s new owners and how much money laundering they’re involved in
First just have a gander at the CEO’s corporate regjstrations in Wyoming. Some of the names like Synthetic Transactions LLC are fuckin laughable.
This record makes it clear Dan Keen is a nominee/straw director (figurehead of company intended to obscure the ultimate beneficial owner) for SOMEONE and I know in my heart who that someone is.
https://opencorporates.com/officers/us\_wy?page=2&q=dan+keen&user=true&utf8=✓
Some great articles outlining how sketchy the new Epik owners are
Dec 2020 (I bet I cld reach out to this reporter)
April 2022
Dec 2023
July 2024
https://www.wired.com/story/registered-agents-north-korean-scam-wmds/