UPDATE - On 12/5/19, fugitive hacker Commander X tweeted that he was granted emergency refugee status in Mexico. In an open letter addressed to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Christopher Doyon wrote, "I request that I be well received, and that I be granted emergency refugee status due to the current threats against my life and liberty by ex-officials of the US government currently involved in the security contracting industry."
Commander X added, "For nearly ten years I have been the target of a campaign of persecution directed against me by the US DoJ and the FBI for my human rights work online, as well as my close association with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange - and my online defense of both."
Doyen vowed to share "working computer code" that the CIA & NSA "use in their network operations and surveillance against" Mexico. He wrote, "If the nation of Mexico will grant me sanctuary, I offer to brief members of your Executive branch, including the President himself - on the nature, extent, and scope of the threat posed to your civil society, economy, and democratic process by the government of the USA through the agency of the CIA & NSA."
"Why have I never heard of Alexandra Chalupa's claim that the United States Department of Justice teamed up with an offshoot of Anonymous known as 'The Protectors'?" @The_War_Economy asked on Twitter in 2018.
There may be two reasons why the mainstream media has stayed away from reporting on the former DNC contractor's work with sketchy characters in 2016, and barely followed-up on a 2017 Politico story about her meetings at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington to get foreign officials to "expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia." The foremost reason is because most journalists report on one side or the other, and there aren't many liberal-leaning reporters who want to give any credence to alleged shenanigans committed by Democrats. But, at the same time, there are conservatives who absurdly claim that reporting on this somehow negates the very real Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The second thing may be fear, since two of the sketchy characters include a convicted bomber and a cyberstalking deadbeat dad, who have terrorized and falsely sued journalists, websites and media organizations.
On November 9. 2016, Alexandra Chalupa wrote on Facebook, "Homeland Security/DOJ teamed up with a group that is part of Anonymous based in Washington, D.C. called 'The Protectors."
"This group saw a lot of activity during Election Day from the Russians and believe that the voting results projected don’t match the internal and public polls because the voting results were manufactured in favor of Trump in heavily Republican counties in key states, and voting results may have been decreased for Clinton in key Democratic counties via malware that was placed by the Russians when they hacked the election systems of more than half our states," Chalupa wrote.
I helped expose "The Protectors" as a hoax in November of 2012. As I noted seven years ago, "On November 16, Wonkette's Rebecca Schoenkopf blogged about an unsubstantiated claim that 'Anonymous had stopped Karl Rove from hacking the election by hacking Orca,' and added 'we think' to the headline."
"Former Democratic operative Neal Rauhauser - who has spent the last two years trolling and harassing conservatives and even liberal critics [including me] - has claimed responsibility for many political hoaxes, in the past, and appears to be one of the driving forces behind this one," I added.
However, perhaps it wasn't a hoax, and a fugitive hacker did hack into the 2012 election.
In his book, "Dark Ops: Anonymous Story", Christopher Doyon aka Commander X claims that on November 6, 2012 he "hacked into the national election in the USA" from a Starbucks in Toronto. "No, seriously," he insists.
"The manifesto for the hack was simple: to find any way we could to destabilize and de-legitimize the 2012 national election in the USA. It was an apolitical approach, we would not attempt to favor either candidate. In fact we would take pains not to. Instead the goal we settled on was in showing easily we hacked in, doing some random damage - and then putting out a statement after detailing the hacks and pointing out the obvious fact that if we could do it, others probably also did too. This line of argument ultimately leading to - no one actually knows who did win the national election in the USA. And whomever they crown would be thus de-legitimized by those lingering questions, and the entire democratic process in the USA would be brought into question over the doubts whether it could ever be secured from network hacking attempts."
X claimed he spent a year-and-a-half working on this operation with his "Crew", and that included "days researching white papers and YouTube videos on proof-of-concept hacks against everything from individual voting machines to the ORCA electronic vote counting systems."
"The latter ended up as our primary attack vector for Florida and Ohio," Doyon wrote.
However, X claimed that "one of the six people in [his] Crew turned out to be a snitch working as a Confidential Informant for the FBI." Without any proof, X fingers Locke as the person who got him "vanned" by the FBI when he was chased and arrested outside of a San Francisco coffee house. Since he was meeting his attorney, Jay Leiderman, at the time of his arrest, it's also possible the feds were wiretapping his communications.
But X and his four remaining alleged co-conspirators - who he names as Gh0stAn0n, Vect0r, PizzaMan and DigitalTerrorists - decided to press on without Locke.
"Days later we packaged the whole thing up and sent it to the media. We invented a Crew in Anonymous called the Protectors of Democracy (a name that still makes me want to vomit), gathered what little forensic evidence we had on the GOP, and blasted the entire thing to the world's media outlets. To their credit, several had the balls to actually go with the story. In the underground, the whole thing became a bit of a legend. Anonymous has been credited with many amazing things but saving the election for Barack Obama has to be right up there near the top of the 'most epic list'. Sort of ironic since Obama has tormented, tortured, jailed and even killed more Information Activists in his eight years than all other previous Presidents combined. Hell of a way to show your gratitude."
"Several months later, the hacker I have called 'Vect0r' live tweeted as he went out on Golden Gate Bridge and threw the laptop he had done the election hack with into the San Francisco Bay," X wrote. "He then left the Underground, got a good paying job as a White Hat security consultant - and never looked back."
"Postscript: I reiterate here the offer I have made publicly in recent months, to both the USA and Russian governments. I will gladly return to the USA in order to offer testimony and evidence to Congress regarding the election in the USA, the above report - and how to end the war between the world's Black Hat hackers and the government of the USA by ceasing political persecution of Information Activists and reforming the CFAA. I will only give testimony to Congress or directly in person to President Trump, and I will never debrief either the FBI oir the CIA. I will require in advance a full Presidential Pardon, and a guarantee of Full Immunity when I testify."
Doyon added: "The counter proposal is addressed to the Russian Government. I will happily travel to Moscow and testify under oath in the Duma regarding the details of the above report. The Russian people, and their government - have been so brutally maligned in the West that I feel they deserve to hear the Truth from someone who is actually on the inside of the Hacker Underground. I will require full and permanent political asylum and transport from Canada to Russia."
Five days before he was set to go to court in February of 2012, Doyon issued a press release called “Commander X escapes into exile.” As The Smoking Gun reported in March of 2012, "A lawyer for Christopher Doyon, a homeless 47-year-old who calls himself 'Commander X, recently told a federal judge that his client 'has fled to Canada,' according to a filing in U.S. District Court in San Jose." The story added, "As a result, an arrest warrant has been issued for Doyon, who is pictured in the above United States Marshals Service mug shots."
Convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin's Velvet Revolution website linked to the letter that the Protectors released in 2012, and former Project Vigilant associate Neal Rauhauser hyped it on a podcast. Rauhauser and Kimberlin have been accused of committing swattings, cyberattacks and countless political hoaxes together. I was absurdly accused of making fake 911 calls to get police to harass bloggers who reported on Weinergate and Kimberlin, and was sued by a lawyer I outed for using a fake name, while asking for people to attach their real names to offensive cartoons of Muhammad. The attorney for Aaron Worthing/Walker was Dan Backer, who later became the Treasurer for a Trump SuperPAC. Patrick Frey, a deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles who blogs as Patterico, falsely accused me of swatting him and working with Rauhauser and Kimberlin, but the judge dismissed the Dan Backer led multi-million dollar bizarre conspiracy theory lawsuit, which conservatives like Law Professor Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck and Ali Akbar promoted and helped raise thousands of dollars slandering me.
I don't think Kimberlin had anything to do with the swattings, but it's possible that Patterico and Rauhauser worked together on them. However, Patterico is correct that the Protectors letter sounds like it was written by Neal Rauhauser. "We may just put all our evidence into a tidy little package and give it to a painfully bored nemesis hanging out in a certain embassy in London," the letter ends, as Patterico notes, and Rauhauser has used the term "tidy little package" before. In a Daily Kos diary post ten years ago, Rauhauser wrote, "Their only choice Huckabee as VP with an aging, tottering McCain't is likely the only thing that'll keep the Republican base in line ... disaster ticket for the country if they should win(read:steal another election) but dream ticket for Democrats - something for everyone to hate all in one tidy little package."
Both Kimberlin and Rauhauser have been involved in lengthy lawsuits against bloggers, media organizations and website owners, so that's probably why most journalists refuse to probe this wacky never-ending saga.
More to come...