Debunking Q&A with Crystalwinds

-From Bionic-ion

have taken the opportunity to breakdown the Q&A with Crystalwind.com post and debunk some things.

> I had an opportunity to ask Mike/trentthethief some detailed questions related to LCQP.

>

> Q: Are you aware of the discussion about you on reddit related to Lake City Quiet Pills?

>

> So I went to reddit this morning to see if I could figure out what you were talking about. Man, was I surprised. I spent an hour looking at posts. It's a little disconcerting to see my name being mentioned in that context, though.

>

First question and Mike tries to distance himself from Reddit, as if Mike hasn't been known to browse Reddit and make posts and comments across many different subs under a variety of usernames.

>

> Here's the deal. I tried my hand at web hosting for small local businesses without much success for several years. I met a guy named Oscar who hired me to host an image website. That's as far as I was involved. I had a dedicated IP and he had a server he wanted online. He paid $50 (cash) a month. When they left he sold me their server which I immediately re-sold to someone (a young lady whose name I can't remember) from a forum. After paying Oscar for the server I never heard from him again.

>

First sentence is true, Mike attempted web hosting for a number of small businesses including his local library prior to 2000. After 2000, crystalwind.com only displayed the quote from DKM's The Long Run. However after 9/11/2001, crystalwind.com radically changed to show a site targeting the perpetrators of 9/11. Shortly after, the domain LakeCityQuietPills.com was registered in November of 2001, along with the creation of AngelTwo-Six account on fark.com using an email address of angel.two.six@lakecityquietpills.com (over a year after TrentTheThief was registered on the same site).

"Oscar" seems like a codename for someone, and it may be an associate of DSF because the image host was not required until Mike began posting there himself.  yellowslinky.com > lakecityquietpills.com > insurgences.net

>

> I also visited goodreads this morning. That is sure as hell not my reading list. I read science fiction (Laumer, Vance, Heinlein, etc.) and Napoleonic-era naval fiction (O'Brian, Forrestor, Lambdin, Stockwin, etc.). Again, not my list.

>

Bull, no one is going to hack Mike's goodreads account to plant a fake reading list.

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> I fully believe they were the real deal.

>

If they were real, Mike was involved. If it wasn't real, he made it all up.

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> I was in the military (Navy (aviation maintenance)).

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Some truth! Mike was definitely in the Navy, evidenced by his FPO address in San Diego.

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> I never met the Milo guy or anyone else.

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Another lie though, as "Milo" was ReligionOfPeace, and that account was secured with Mike's password.

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> Q: Did you host lcqp from 2001 to 2010?

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> I don't know how long they owned that domain. But I know that I didn't host it for 9+ years. Lake City was something I added to my server where CWC lived.

>

LakeCityQuietPills.com wasn't originally created for the use as an image host, but was ran along side Crystalwind.com from 2001 until 2012. This is verified by the DNS history showing the same hosting servers for over a decade, as well as showing LakeCityQuietPills.com was created right after 9/11.

>

> Q: Did you get to know him at all over that period, or anything strike you as interesting about him? Did you deal much face to face?

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> I met Oscar at Best Buy. I was looking for a new PC for my kid and he was looking for a PC and asked me if I knew about computers. When I said a bit, he asked if I thought any of the PCs there were okay to run a webserver. Things went forward from that.

>

> I met him once after that to get his server (I don't know who set it up) and once for coffee a while before he shutdown. Otherwise, it was cash in an envelope mailed to me every month

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> I never dealt with anyone else at LC except by email. 3-4 different people emailed as angel 26 when there were server issues they couldn't fix remotely or when they'd crashed the image host software

Oscar definitely sounds like a stand-in for an associate of DSF. Also, Mike claims he fixed server issues for them whenever the image host crashed, so he knew what kind of material was hosted there.

>

> Q: What indicated that there were multiple Angel 26's?

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> The first 26 sometimes signed as Jero, another one as Bishop. Jero didn't write well (grammer/spelling/phrasing). Bishop and Pierce (Pearce?) could both write well enough, but one was very terse and had no sense of humor and the other was pretty wordy. There was another 26, too. But I only knew about him because Shade told me he was new. A week later, he was replaced (no emails from him).

>

Understanding the "transfer" of 2-6, it went from Jerro Mank (u/ReligionOfPeace), to the original AngelTwo-Six (u/2-6), to Pierce, then Bishop (u/The\_Bishop\_of\_Durban), and finally Kim (u/Dustoff\_Avenger), right?  Every single account on DSF was registered with the same IP

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> Q: Were you aware of the hidden message board on LCQP?

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> I never looked at the image host except to upload images, check log files, restart it, or when the ISP shut down the connection after they received an offensive image report. There were some other reports, but most people reported them with the TOS violation email address. It was definitely not a kiddie porn site. They didn't like hate stuff or gore, either, and amended the TOS boilerplate to state as much.

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> I went to reddit and read about the buried information after you emailed. I don't think I'd have hidden anything on a public page that way, but they weren't techie. Anything you don't want anyone to see really needs to be behind some sort of autho system.

>

Mike surely knew what kind of images were hosted on the site, and surely if he setup the image host which wasn't in the top directory, he knew what was in the top directory. Mike's post on DSF stating Milo did not want kiddie porn on the his site was pretty clear, especially after being hacked. And yes, an autho system would be nice, that's why Mike switched to encoded binary and PGP.

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> Q: What do you think of the term Lake City Quiet Pills?

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> I'd heard of lake city while I was in the service (my last unit had a lot of active hunters/competitive shooters).

>

So Mike heard it in the 80's, when he was in the Navy?  How many men in the service actually care to know where their bullets are made?  And to the point, this response makes no sense. No attempt to explain how LCAAP plays into the name of LCQP? No attempt to explain how quiet pills refers to bullets (except mentioning competitive shooters)? Mike has gotten lazy.

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> Q: Are you the Flink user on goodreads/flink@crystalwinds.com?

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> That flink account was mine, but that was not my book list. There was crap on there that I would never read. After I saw it I deleted the account. I hadn't visited in many years and can't be bothered with social sites in general. I still drop into slashdot and hacker news on occasion if I'm bored. I don't comment very much any more. I'm too busy or can't be bothered.

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> Flink is a random name I picked as a throwaway for a site I needed to register on to use when I didn't want to use my current address.

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Flink is definitely Mike, and the book list is definitely his, no one is going to hack a goodreads account to setup a fake book list to incriminate Mike, he does that all by himself.

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> Q: Are you trentthethief on FARK/slashdot?

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> I am trentthethief on slashdot and on FARK (I didn't know FARK was still alive)

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TrentTheThief on almost every forum/game Mike plays, including the forum for the tech writing software "MadCap Flare".

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> Q: Did you embed hidden data (TI calculator something or another) within the html of crystalwinds? Was this a fairly common practice among savvy web hosts at the time?

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> I did hide the TI calc stuff to mirror it and avoid takedown notices. There was a big thing going on about TI and their calculator code on Slashdot. I'd mirrored other information in the past yo keep it from being hidden/suppressed (the UK JET Report being one of note: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/sci.psychology.misc/1J7hBuZnOTA/RXY9hAnDXTAJ). I think another slashdotter made the suggestion about hiding info in comments.

>

Mike most definitely hid the TI calc stuff on crystalwind.com [September 2009](https://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/09/21/1418256/ti-vs-calculator-hackers), but that was 3 months after the first hidden job board on lakecityquietpills.com in June of 2009.

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> Q: Do you think it is purely coincidental that LCQP used the same invisible ink method, or do you think they selected your services for some reason because of this?

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> Maybe LC hid it that because it's relatively easy to do if you have access to the files. Maybe it was easier for them to tell someone how to find the comments rather than making login details that can be forgotten and figuring out how to give new credentials when the user forgets. I don't know. The only other comments I've ever seen in html code are about settings or something else related to the page.

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> It's not very likely I was chosen unless I was being tracked as if in a conspiracy movie. It was a very random meeting. But not uncommon, I'd think, given how many blank faces I've seen in computer stores.

>

The line of questioning is putting the hidden job board after his "invisible ink method" on crystalwind, which is not accurate. Also, Mike's response about why LCQP had hidden text in the page source kind of says he thought a lot about the reasons to do it the way he did.

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> Q: Is there anything in particular you would want communicated or clarified to the community who has become interested in this?

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> I've spent way too much time poking around in this the last few days.

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> If LC is still out there as a group, they've got to have changed how they communicate after seeing all the interested parties looking for them. I don't think looking at things LC abandoned years ago is a useful pursuit since they were doing it wrong anyway.

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> I really wish I'd known about this when it was happening and been in on what they were doing. I would have helped them with technical advice. Besides, that, Milo sounds cool and I would have liked to meet him.

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> Personally, I doubt they'd even care about anyone looking for them. That being said, I don't think I'd want to be looking for them and then actually run into them if they didn't want to be found.

>

More FUD? The only truth in all of that was Mike changed the way he communicated with whomever he was running the server with, and that he thinks of himself as cool, since he was Milo. Also, in the answer to the 3rd question, he states he fixed server issues they couldn't fix remotely, implying he knew enough of what was going on to have a hand in it to fix their technical issues.

> Q: Are you aware that you commented on the same thread as angel26 on Fark at one point?

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> LOL,  I had to look :-)

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> I never would have looked twice at the name. That was way before I'd met Oscar. Cool coincidence

>

Twice, not just once. And commented about the same National Lampoon nostalgia, "cool coincidence", indeed.