"There's nothing you can do about it, ever, no matter how hard you try, no matter who you contact. You're just a failure of life, accept it. You've been trolled, you've lost, have a nice day."
This quote, taken from a 2007 YouTube clip, shows Andrew Auernheimer at his most menacing. He's sitting in a dark room, his face illuminated by the computer screen, relishing in a victory over some unsuspecting web user.
Over the past few years, Auernheimer has established himself as one of the world's most accomplished "trolls" — people who deliberately lie or mislead in an attempt to provoke a response. He's masqueraded as an anti-Semitic preacher, a millionaire hacker and an anti-child porn activist, and has used his influence to strike fear into the hearts of countless internet denizens. He's recreated his identity to suit his purposes on several occasions, using names like Escher Auernheimer, Andrew Austerlitz, and Andrew Wbeelsoi — an anagram for "web o lies". Earlier this year he even trolled us, claiming he was a 42-year-old Swiss industrial engineer for an interview about the merits of online censorship. Click here to read that story.
But today the 24-year-old's web of lies is in tatters, after he exposed a security flaw in the Apple iPad and was subsequently arrested for possession of drugs, including cocaine, LSD, Ecstasy, and various scheduled pharmaceuticals. A mugshot of the thick-bearded young man was circulated on various internet sites, as well as his online name, Weev, and hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas. For someone who revelled in online anonymity, it was undoubtedly a painful dose of real-world exposure.
We contacted Auernheimer, who is currently at home awaiting trial, to learn more about his situation and find out why he chooses to create these separate identities.
"A while ago I went to a Mormon stake conference," he wrote us in an email, explaining his first introduction to trolling.
"I'm not a Mormon but I read their scripture just to understand one of the major cultural forces of America. I wanted to see their religion in action. One of the speakers at this conference was trying to convince young Mormons to become missionaries. He told his flock (I'm paraphrasing here), 'There is great power in anonymity. The things you can do when nobody knows who you are will dwarf that which you can accomplish in your own identity.'"
Using this quote as an inspiration, he claims to have waged war on a group of internet users who traded in animated child pornography on the LiveJournal website in 2007.
"We wanted to terrorise these pedophiles," he explains. "I got a bunch of soccer moms together and started getting them psyched about fighting child pornography on the Internet."
He said he found contact information for the website's advertisers, which he then delivered to the soccer mums who convinced the advertisers to cut off funding to the site. Eventually, he claims, two senior employees at the site were fired through his efforts.
Due to his reputation, it's hard to know whether Auernheimer is telling the truth about his connection to what happened at LiveJournal. However, archived news reports confirm that the website did launch a large-scale crackdown on animated child pornography at the time.
"It felt like an amazing victory. It was my conversion not only to a new form of trolling rooted in the human consciousness, but to Christianity as well," he wrote.
Using his knowledge of the Bible, Auernheimer later created the iProphet, a series of pseudo-sermons he recorded on a webcam and posted on YouTube and iTunes. In the clips he decries the "Zionistic Media", claims Michael Jackson died because he was a "pederast" and says that Jesus would have supported drug users.
The videos have led to him being described as anti-Semitic and hateful in the media, but Auernheimer insists it is simply an elaborate troll.
"I see a lot of things wrong with the world. I use art to speak out against those things. It is in the same vein as all my other art," he wrote.
"The fact that mere videos posted on the Internet have elicited so much shock, outrage, anger, fear and government response is proof that what I do is great art. I have no intention of stopping.
"If I am thrown in jail, my greatest works of art are yet to come from the confines of the cell."
Auernheimer's unravelling began earlier this year when he set up a website called Goatse Security — the name is a reference to an obscene internet meme — which employed a team of volunteer hackers to try to find flaws in computer systems, particularly the Apple iPad.
In early June Goatse Security found their Holy Grail — a leak in AT&T's security system which exposed the personal details of 114,000 iPad owners. The information was widely circulated in the media and prompted a vicious response from AT&T.
"We learned that unauthorised computer 'hackers' maliciously exploited a function designed to make your iPad log-in process faster," the telco's vice president wrote in an apology email to iPad users.
Auernheimer said that instead of criticising him, AT&T and Apple should be thanking him.
"Let us get something clear: if I were malicious, I would have sold this data to foreign intelligence agencies and you never would have heard of it," he wrote.
"Or I might have used the Safari exploit we developed months before the iPad data leak to try to compromise networks. In this instance, you never would have heard my name in relation to this story.
"If I were merely sleazy, I would have used this highly targeted list to market iPad accessories via bulk e-mail. In this instance, I would have made a very nice chunk of money unethically and with absolutely no legal risk. Given my years of experience in the direct email marketing field, this would have been a trivial task.
"Instead, I took this dataset which was given to me and used it altruistically to inform the public of a very real risk to them ... they simply wanted to scapegoat us for the problem. We did a public service, and I stand by that despite efforts to crucify me over it."
Following the leak the FBI searched his Fayetteville home with an unspecified warrant and allegedly found the drugs he was later charged with possessing.
Auernheimer told us that he believes the drugs were planted by police, but his advocation of drugs — notably through one of his iProphet sermons — have weakened his claim.
"I openly advocate the use of some, but not all drugs. Which is part of what makes this case hard to fight," he wrote.
"I am in real trouble solely because I opened my mouth and expressed my dissatisfaction in an effective manner entirely within the bounds of the law, as opposed to keeping my head down and consuming products."
Auernheimer is now pleading for financial help to fight his case. But for someone whose past is so deeply entwined in falsehoods, it's hard to know if people will choose to start believing him.
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