In December 1999 I received an e-mail from Brad Carter aka "RBCP" who wrote, "I'm one of the people that was involved in the BNF spamming and hat stealing a long time ago." and
with that he asked if I would like to have the "hacker's side of the story" as part of the Internet subculture archive and I told him I would. The following is the communication between
myself and Brad Carter and his story. I thank Brad for writing his story and allowing me to include it as part of the archive history.
Subj: Ah, the memories...
Date: 99-12-03 14:44:52 EST
From: brad_the_carter@yahoo.com (Brad Carter)
To: acandyrose@aol.com
I've been going through your web pages about the JonBenet forum incidents for well over 3 hours now and I've been laughing my ass off. You've done a tremendous job capturing the
insaneness that went on during the BNF days and I've really enjoyed reading about it all again.
I'm one of the people that was involved in the BNF spamming and hat stealing a long time ago (This is RBCP from the PLA if that means anything to you.) and if you ever want to look at
some old postings, I've still got my old archive up at http://www.phonelosers.org/bnf.html - feel free to take anything out of there that you need. And if you ever want some commentary
from the "hacker side" of the whole thing just let me know.
Thanks again for the great pages!
Brad Carter
http://www.phonelosers.org/rbcp/
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Subj: Re: Ah, the memories...
Date: 99-12-03 16:53:18 EST
From: ACandyRose
To: brad_the_carter@yahoo.com
In a message dated 99-12-03 14:44:52 EST, brad_the_carter@yahoo.com writes:
"And if you ever want some commentary from the "hacker side" of the whole thing just let me know."
Hello Brad,
Actually I would like to hear the "other" side of the whole thing. :-)
I have heard so many version of things and I think the "other" side should be told no matter what the story or who was involved. Is this something you are willing to do in a private
manner with me personally or is this for publication? Either request will be honored. :-)
BJ (aka ACandyRose)
=================================================
Subj: Re: Ah, the memories...
Date: 99-12-03 17:26:25 EST
From: brad_the_carter@yahoo.com (Brad Carter)
To: ACandyRose@aol.com
"I have heard so many version of things and I think the "other" side should be told no matter what the story or who was involved. Is this something you> are willing to do in a private
manner with me personally or is this for > publication? Either request will be honored. :-)"
I could write up a condensed version of my experiences for publication on your site which would center mostly around Jameson, Tannest, the PLA attacks a few other things back in
the early days. One thing Tannest refuses to admit is that she was the ringleader in the original attacks and it's be nice to have that down in print. I can't believe she's saying that
she's a victim in all this and all she ever wanted was justice for JBR.
Anyway I'm rambling. I'll try to get something written and email it to you within a week or two, maybe even this weekend if I can find the time. I'll try to keep it short but tell as much of
the story as I know.
Thanks again for the page! I'm STILL looking over it as I sit here at work and it's incredible. I wish you could fix the broken links and "under construction" pages, though. The whole
design of the page is excellent, though!
Brad
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Subj: Re: Ah, the memories...
Date: 99-12-03 19:52:31 EST
From: ACandyRose
To: brad_the_carter@yahoo.com
In a message dated 99-12-03 17:26:25 EST, brad_the_carter@yahoo.com writes:
"I could write up a condensed version of my experiences for publication on your site"
Thanks Brad, make it as long as you like. I would hate for you to leave out some important detail just to keep something condensed. :-)
I will be anxious to hear your story. Thank you so much.
BJ (aka ACandyRose)
=================================================
Subj: Re: Ah, the memories...
Date: 99-12-12 23:40:36 EST
From: brad_the_carter@yahoo.com (Brad Carter)
To: ACandyRose@aol.com
By the way, what happened to the BNF? It was working a few months ago but when I went to check it the other day it had disappeared again. Do you know what happened this time? And
do you know where the BNF regulars relocated to?
=================================================
Subj: Re: Ah, the memories...
Date: 99-12-13 18:09:54 EST
From: ACandyRose@aol.com
To: brad_the_carter@yahoo.com
In a message dated 99-12-12 23:40:36 EST, brad_the_carter@yahoo.com writes:
"By the way, what happened to the BNF?"
Brad,
Thanks for your story. I need to review it again and will no doubt have some questions. I will get back to you in a day or two on that.
On the other questions you ask on this e-mail referenced above, the BNF was closed as of May 18, 1999 and has not been opened since. I do not know what happened other than many
believe it was the PLA again as it had similar type postings they said from previous hackings. I guess your saying your not taking credit for that last shut down, eh? Some also believe
that Lance Matthews and what they call his PLA buddies were responsible. I don't know who is responsible, I only know it is gone.
The BNF regulars scattered, some on each of the forums and some totally disappeared. Many changed hat names and identities also. We still have many MIA. Of course the duplicate
hats probably had a lot to do with it also as they might not have been able to carry those to the other forums wherever they made their new homes. Why do you ask?
In your first email to me you mentioned Jameson's name but your story did not include her. Did you forget? That is one of my first questions. Where does Jameson fit in? She is NOT
my favorite person and I am not her favorite person so please feel free to detail anything you would like about her.
I will read your story again and get back to you more on that. In the meantime you have a few questions here I wouldn't mind answers to.
Thanks, BJ (aka ACandyRose)
=================================================
Subj: Re: Ah, the memories...
Date: 99-12-20 12:47:08 EST
From: brad_the_carter@yahoo.com (Brad Carter)
To: ACandyRose@aol.com
"On the other questions you ask on this e-mail referenced above, the BNF was closed as of May 18, 1999 and has not been opened since. I do not know what happened other than many
believe it was the PLA again as it had similar type postings they said from previous hackings. I guess your saying your not taking credit for that last shut down, eh? Some also believe
that Lance Matthews and what they call his PLA buddies were responsible. I don't know who is responsible, I only know it is gone."
Nope, I'm definitely not taking credit for this one. I hadn't even been on the BNF for at least a month prior to May 18th and I doubt that it was anyone from "the PLA" who was
responsible because I'm sure they would have come bragging to me about it.
Lance Matthews may have done it but I also think he would have said something to me. I don't know Lance very well but everyone seems to think he's really close with the PLA,
probably just because I put a banner up for his radio show on my site. But I would do that for just about anyone. It also could have been Tannest. I know she likes to have the appearance
that she is totally reformed and her sole purpose in life is justice for JBR, but I know her better than that. She has a lot of free time and likes to cause trouble just like I do so she can
see the reaction of the other people. She may have not indended for it to get shut down but she could have done something to contribute to it. Who knows.
"In your first email to me you mentioned Jameson's name but your story did not include her. Did you forget? That is one of my first questions. Where does Jameson fit in? She is NOT
my favorite person and I am not her favorite person so please feel free to detail anything you would like about her."
I didn't forget but I really didn't know too much about her during the time that I was doing all of this. I did use her name on a lot of my spam threads but that was just a random thing
because I wanted to use the name of a poster to cause even more mayhem. The only thing I really remember about Jameson is that one of the people on our side (Spessa/GlueGirl) called
her on the phone one night and tried to convince her that Patsy had been arrested. This is when Jameson started threatening us with lawsuits and stuff. If you'd like I could go through
my story and add in a few tidbits about Jameson but it wouldn't be anything very detailed because I was never into attacking her directly. I think Tannest was the one with a problem
with her.
"I will read your story again and get back to you more on that. In the meantime you have a few questions here I wouldn't mind answers to."
Ask away and I'll try to answer them as best as I can. And if you'd like me to modify the story or add some more details to it I can try to do that for you.
Brad
=================================================
Subj: Re: Ah, the memories...
Date: 99-12-12 23:38:28 EST
From: brad_the_carter@yahoo.com (Brad Carter)
To: ACandyRose@aol.com
"Thanks Brad, make it as long as you like. I would hate for you to leave out some important detail just to keep something condensed. :-) I will be anxious to hear your story. Thank you
so much."
Welp, here it is. I would have had it last weekend but I got pretty sick and wasn't able to do much. If you'd like me to add anything or elaborate on something or whatever just let me
know and I'll try to fix it. Feel free to edit anything you need to in it. I just cut and pasted the article into this e-mail so if the format comes out screwy let me know and I'll send it as an
attachment instead. Thanks for letting me write this, it was kind of fun.
----------begin article------
The other day I was browsing through my old bookmarks and came across some sites that eventually led me to the page called A Candy Rose which was the coolest page I'd ever seen
regarding the whole JBR subculture. I e-mailed the webmaster and offered to tell my side of the story to give some of the readers a "hacker's view" of the whole thing and she said
that'd be great. So here's my story. Don't expect a climax or a point to the story because there is none, just as there was never a point to our BNF adventures.
The forum terror from my side started with a kid named Logicbox and a woman named Tannest. I'm not sure exactly when they started bothering the BNF or even why. I knew both
Tannest (aka cofegirl, SamKay, Samantha Stack, etc) and Logicbox only from IRC and considered myself to be pretty good friends with them both. Logicbox had been inviting me to
come to the BNF for months during the summer of 1997 and I finally went there and browsed around.
I wasn't that impressed at first and quickly became bored with it. I posted a few crazy messages suggesting that the Phone Losers of America were somehow involved because
detectives had found red boxes hidden behind the walls and that JonBenet actually committed suicide. Then I left. The next day Logicbox messaged me on IRC again and told me to
check out the replies to my message so I did and it was a little funnier this time because people either yelled at me for being disrespectful or they asked me for more details on the red
box theory. So I began checking the BNF every couple days and I kept posting weird things about the PLA being involved mostly so people would come and check out my web site.
In April of 1997 Logicbox wrote a small article about the BNF harassment and sent it to me. That week I released PLA's issue #45 which included his article and we all thought that
more or less marked the end of it. We had all grown a little tired of them and I stopped going there all together for several months after that. Around July or August Tannest e-mailed
me and told me she was still playing at BNF and mostly just impersonating other peoples' hats to start fights between the users. So I went there once again and had a look at the mess
she had created and it was hilarious. So I kind of got into it again.
Right around the end of July my wife took her yearly 3 week vacation to Oregon to see her parents. She took our daughter with her and suddenly I was all alone and had WAY too much
time on my hands. This is when the problems at BNF started to get really really bad. I began spending more or less all of my free time on BNF sometimes even staying up until the
early morning just to bother them. I tried to keep them all talking about the PLA as much as a possibly could and they finally came to the conclusion that I must work for John Ramsey
who must be trying to take away attention from the case.
This whole time I had been capturing the funniest posts and began writing the Boulder News Frenzy which was just an archive of all the hilarious posts on BNF. The archive is now
located at http://www.phonelosers.org/bnf.html if anyone wants to read it. I became so wrapped up in the whole BNF thing that I started bringing disks full of posts to my job and spent
half of my work day going through posts and archiving them into my BNF 'zine. Of course my work started to suffer but it was a cruddy job so no big loss there..
I ate, drank and slept BNF and one day as I was driving to work the idea hit me to set up a web page that would automatically generate garbage threads to the BNF. It seemed like such a
good idea at the time that I actually turned around, skipped work and went home to set up the page. I copied the form used to post a message from the BNF page and turned all the forms
into hidden information that would post the same thing each time and in the subject line it would say something like "I have all of Jameson's personal information. Go to this URL to
get it!!"
When they went to the URL they would be asked to click a button to see the information which would post the same message again. All I had to do was post the message once and then
each of the BNF users would go to the URL and click. This filled up BNF's page in no time and the funniest part was that the BNF regulars were the ones unknowingly doing it
themselves.
After they finally figured it out and stopped clicking the button, I set up another page that was disguised as a "free kiddie porn" page. The page claimed to have the largest selection of
child pornography and all you had to do to look at it was click the "enter" button. Of course this just generated another thread to BNF. I set up a bot in every IRC porn channel I could
find that automatically advertised my kiddie porn page to every person who joined the channel. This method averaged about one garbage thread per minute. The BNF regulars were
thinking this was completely insane that someone would sit there and post threads all day for days at a time, but I was actually at work while it was going on. During this period the
garbage threads were scrolling away the real posts so quickly that the BNF became completely unusable. I think me and Tannest finally agreed that I should stop so we could have fun
with them again. So I did and we went back to the same old stuff, impersonating other users, making up false theories about the case and causing as much of a ruckus as we possibly
could.
The response from the forum regulars was far from anything sane. They obsessed over the destruction of the PLA and all associated with it. They promised to have someone come to
my door and rip my limbs off and they called up Tannest's work and Logicbox's school trying to get them in trouble with their superiors. They claim that they even called the mayor of
the city I lived in and yelled at him about me. But all this did was cause us to laugh hysterically and try even harder to create problems.
Our fun eventually came to an abrupt stop when the forum closed it's doors for what we thought would be forever. They eventually went back online with new software which wasn't as
much fun to work with. Tannest stayed and caused trouble but me and Logicbox kind of got bored with it after that. Eventually Tannest and Logicbox broke up their online relationship
for reasons unknown to me and me and I started being really mean to Tannest since I never really liked her that much and didn't have any reason to be nice to her anymore.
I still checked in from time to time and there was always huge fights between the users and I never could tell if they were truly arguing with each other or if an imposter was
responsible. The forum continued to get shut down for unknown reasons but always seemed to come back up again. Today it appears to be shut down once again but who knows how long
that will last. I don't really keep up with the whole JBR sub-culture anymore but I do hear from some of the old users from time to time who drop me an e-mail to say "hello" or "fuck
you" or whatever and I occasionally go through some of my old bookmarked BNF sites to see if anything good is happening.
RBCP can be reached via his homepage at
http://www.phonelosers.org/rbcp/