Shadow Warfare

/pol/'s Holy War

In Ukrainian.

DISCLAIMER: the article was initially written in English as part of a series of two threads on 4chan, new information was gradually being published in the Telegram channel specifically designated for the topic. This article and previous ones where Q and his personality were discussed one way or another should be first reviewed by the reader before continuing with the current article. This article is also a framework for the following one.
Thread #1, thread #2. Telegram channel.

The following was part of neither the first nor of the second thread on 4chan and will be covered in the following article: /pol/ lost and should not have won anyway. The purpose of this article is an explanation of processes having taken and are currently taking place on the board. The war was fought for minds. Being a beacon of free speech, reason, and inconvenient truth, /pol/ was a great place for discussion. However, due to its users capabilities (m00t has a "CEO of Troll Inc." nickname for a reason) and previously mentioned features of the board itself, /pol/ turned out to be both an effective tool for achieving certain goals and a problem for the elites on both sides. If 4chan was already occupied by the US authorities around 2008, the beginning of the end took place in 2014 - during Gamergate - and climaxed in 2019 when 8chan was banned by Cloudflare (which is not supposed to do so and has not so far gone on a banhammer spree for other resources, which raises a question of whether this kill was political).

At this point, the System (in this article, the System is considered to be a network of people and foundations that have exceptional capabilities for pushing their interests. It is an international entity that does not care about borders and works both in private and state sectors) already turned the Internet in the product that no human on the Earth with a few exceptions could not avoid using. The Internet is supposed to become a medium that connects everyone and everything - literally - into one network that will be controlled by a limited number of people. Gathering intelligence, segregating people based on social scores that in return depend on the rules written by the System, making more and more services virtual, and others tasks are nowadays well accomplished by this large project.

One of the great examples is Facebook that was founded the same day that DARPA closed its project called LifeLog (both are doing the same thing - spy on users and log activities they are engaged in). Additionally, DARPA's director is now employed by Facebook. Apart from information gathering, the company also attempted to create its own currency that would have made success just because of how well-integrated Facebook is.

In late August, there was a sudden spike in shill activity in /egg/ (Epstein-Ghislaine General) threads (worth mentioning that they flooded both the imageboard in general and /pol/ in particular). We noticed that OP did not update the first post as new findings were being discovered, and sometimes also modified it in such a way that it seemed as it had been posted by anybody but a genuine /egg/ anon. Additionally, we came across a wall of off-topic shitposting, derailing in the threads, and attempts to make anons spend their energy on replying to the said kinds of posts. We started paying attention to details and figured out that:

We received a backlash from 4chan administration in terms of our /egg/ threads were being deleted while shills' /egg/ threads were left untouched. Some, including me, even received bans. Some anons were doxxed. The British anon traced that the source of doxing was an Israeli embassy in Dublin, though I personally doubt the validity of his findings; his methodology also was not explained in details, we only know he used Wireshark.

As time passed, we doxxed the bot farmer via content he was sending, which resulted in a military-tier image flooding. Additionally, the shill responses became more aggressive and the thread was sent to an archive 4 minutes after the last reply, even though the timer is set for 30 minutes by default. The next thread was deleted after anons pushed the doxxing aspect a little bit further. Eventually, shills seem to have greatly ceased operations (occasional bots still posted, though). We figured out the website of the farmer https://g01m.rocks (it has a subdomain "twinkie" which corresponds to the Linux machine name hosting the subdomain. Worth mentioning that the website's About section references the US Department of Defense standards DoDD.7050.06 and DoDM 5105.21-V2). It is hosted by a company called NetActuate. The thing about it is that it works only with organizations it wants to work with (they have a massive network, that is why) - the website has a respective form.

Consequently, said British anon found farmer's name — Ronald/Daniel Shiflet. Shiflet likes horror literature; interestingly enough, g01m website has a myth-like fiction story told on its pages. One of shills used to brag about Pulitzer he was going to get. We found Shiflet's account on Amazon. He wrote a couple of books whose covers are styled somewhat similarly to the aforementioned bot content. We also traced that he was shilling since November 2017 (the website states the start date to be November 14), two months after Q first emerged on /pol/.

Some time later, anon posted the following information in one of the /egg/ threads. Ronald Shiflet is the eggposter, Ben Kaldwurse is the planeposter, lax0gpoppy is the one who posts "ain't clickin that shit" pictures, controls bots, and manages both g01m's Twitter bot _g01m_ and the website. Other notable people are SaintRipperVon and Christian Grey/St3mworks.

Googling names of these characters occasionally led to old discussions in Google Groups. Even Q supporters were regarded as Qfags by these people, the vast majority of _g01m_'s followers are indeed Q supporters. Later in the article the reader will see the cause of such tensions between lax0gpoppy and Q fanbase.

_g01m_ Twitter account mentiones Etylexus. As per Urban Dictionary user etylexus' definition, it means the following.

My take is that G01M is either a project of wannabe-glowniggers or a way actual glowniggers are having fun. Considering what lax0gpoppy was posting on Twitter (his account was eventually suspended so no proflinks are available - except for maybe on Wayback Machine or archive.is - only a screenshot), the scale of operations, and intentions they pursue, the former seems more reasonable.
Note: from this point onwards, bot farmer/shill master = lax0gpoppy. Later it will be bot farmer/shill master = lax0gpoppy = etylexus = gnupol. Consider that the article is talking about him unless directly stated otherwise.

My research at the time of writing two threads mentioned at the very beginning of the artcile was concerned with /egg/ threads and did not involve anything else so I did not pay much attention to what exactly G01M team was posting. As soon as 8kun (official replacement for 8chan) emerged on the US DoD network, some stuff that they tried to tell other people started making sense.

This is one of the posts that shill master we discussed previously left in one of the /egg/ threads.

The first link in lax0poppy's post refers the cryptic song he left at the beginning of 2019. What it stands for exactly is open for a debate. Considering that the post had an image in which lax0gpoppy highlighted that DoD's CIO originally came from JPMorgan Chase, line "every bit passing the poe tuss traced" may be a subtle warning that all data left by anons is saved.

Link #2 provides more information. Here, a new name is mentioned - gnu (later it will be found that the full nickname is gnupol) who is part of G01M team. The anon that posted this information also mentioned bot activity.

Taking a look at their whole conversation, it looks like both sides of it were scared/confused by the botposting and Q's personality controversy. At the very beginning, Q talked to anons without a tripcode but later embraced one probably due to the fact that it was very easy to LARP as Q otherwise. gnupol (I assume he and lax0gpoppy are the same individual) did not like this and started acting aggresively towards Q and its supporters.

Link #3 has another link to the .cgi file on go1m.rocks website that is used for controlling bots and keeping track of their posts.

Note the key words in this link and the one in the screenshot below. Bot usage confirmed for another time. 01%3A16%3A33 = 01:16:33 (Los Angeles time of when the thread was created), 02%3A47%3A22 = 02:47:22 (time of the most recent bot post) 46 = the current number of posts in the thread.

Search for "G01M" on 4plebs archive gave the following results. In the image below, the reader can see the logs that gnupol posted and a link to the text file (filename = post number) that outlines what bakers are involved in as well as their environment in general.

Search for that post number gives the following. Rule 11 is "Advertising (all forms) is not welcome—this includes any type of referral linking, "offers", soliciting, begging, stream threads, etc." as per 4chan's Rules page. Notice that the style of the post image is similar to the style of images from /egg/ threads.

The "++" thing refers to this Q's post. One of the replies had the image below posted. This is probably the moment since when gnu has been in opposition to Q. Considering that Q's previous posts contained way more information than merely "++", gnupol's concerns are understandable.

Jumping to the thread in the image above may be beneficial for understanding of what exactly was happening. Bots have already been in place and have already attacked anons but gnupol seems to have been on their side yet. It is September 19, 2017 that gnupol emphasized the "++" thing and started raising questions. The "++" post itself was posted a day before.

Another search result for G01M and another confirmation that it is responsible for botposting. One of the previous images mentioned that the baker union was on strike at some point, the image below provides the reason for it.

This one is trivial.

November 24, 2017 seems to be the moment when gnupol goes into a rage mode and starts attacking other posters. Note "We are doxxing all of you. Every last one." Interestingly enough, 4 days after this post, gnupol leaves another message this time acompanied by an image with IPv4 addresses (post #151239756).

Then, there are a number of posts made by gnupol. Each link leads to a page with his findings. The reason why he was collecting all this information was because he had an intention to create an archive of the current (at that time period) events.

If the reader searches for gnupol on Google, chances are this Amazon page will come up.

Back to /egg/. Around September 25, Treadstone 71 came up on our radars. Further investigation showed that it (at least on its Twitter account) does not hide the fact that it has something to do with 4chan's /pol/.

We dug more and found a bunch of threads with proofs that 4chan administration is 100% System-affiliated. We also found that recent mass shootings happened thanks to the 4chan mods (interestingly, 8chan was killed for Tarrant's crusade while 4chan was left untouched regardless of how many new shooters were connected with it). Chances are nothing will ever shut 4chan down because it is controlled by the System.

We have proofs that bots use(d) proxies. NetActuate's capabilities should allow this (at the time the first thread was written, there was an aggressive advertisement of Oxylab's proxying services but we do not think this company has anything to do with G01M).

Our first attempt to explain certain things happening in /egg/. Using different languages for two anons made us reach a conclusion that G01M team has access to the IP addresses of the posters (for instance, 4chan janitors probably see some part of the IPs while moderators see them in full). As mentioned earlier, we experienced a backlash from bots/G01M members in terms of attacks on individual posters. Notice that 226630569 has the same phrase — "dumb fucking kraut troll" — repeated three times. People usually do not talk like that meaning that this all is AI's job. It becomes obvious in post 226494651 which is filled with nonsense and was published after one of the anons had spotted something suspicious in the other anons' behaviour.

We noticed that some posts were deleted for no reason and not by the anons that wrote them. As we double checked in the 4plebs archive, each and every of them either a) pointed out obvious flaws in G01M team's tactic or b) was used for anon cooperation.

This is an example of cooperation that was deleted from 4chan. For some reason, bumps for the old /egg/ thread got deleted as well after a new — created by G01M — was started. Additionally, a 226256810 post pointing to that the new anon-made /egg/ thread was deleted as well as the reply to it from a different anon noting that the thread got killed.

As we further dove into the communication with bots and their master behind the command and control panel, we realized that bots were used to a) shut down (flood) the discussion of anything suspicious happening with /egg/, b) keep threads started by G01M afloat with timed bumping, c) make it feel like /egg/ is just another shitposting central on 4chan's /pol/, and d) threaten and demoralize anons.

We also noticed that images bots were posting were named in a way that excluded having spaces in between the words. This greatly assists bot masters since a) they would not have to figure out how to use escape characters for spaces and b) the AI could make use of the filenames and use them according to the context of the specific post/thread. lax0gpoppy also decided to show us that there is at least one Linux server in use, which does not have a Graphical User Interface and thus is definitely used for activities other than posting on 4chan via a browser.

Going through the 4plebs archive, we happened to come across a woman that was present in the bots' images. We traced a use of her in graphic content back to November 2017, two months after first QAnon's appearance on 4chan. As G01M's website suggests, bots were first deployed on November 14, 2017 (being more specific, it states that G01M started its operations that day).

Another example of 4chan administration conspiracy is that other threads related to PizzaGate were deleted from /pol/ as well, even though topic of symbolism in pop-culture was an important part of it. This made us think that the scale of warfare is not narrowed to /egg/ exclusively. Nuff said, /pol/ is flooded with threads that are not compliant to the board rules in the stickied post.

It also prevented legitimate anon activities from being done. For instance, after applying certain changes to the /egg/ template pastebin, mod issued a ban for posting off-topic.

As mentioned previously, British anon traced the System to have an operations center in Dublin, Ireland. He reported to have been doxxed with the help of either malicious software or traffic analysis. He was not the only example, here is another.

The most ironic thing happens: lax0gpoppy who threatened everyone with doxx gets doxxed. One of the images with the aforementioned woman he used said "Sneaking up on a glow nigger could be the last thing you ever do". Little did he notice (unless it was done on purpose, which is also possible) that the HTML code he put in the image contained a Twitter username @laxog_poppy. We already saw l4x0g as a username on a Linux machine so this was definitely a hit. We also found his YouTube account etylexus. His Twitter had a link to an /egg/ thread (it is known that botnets can react to a command coming from a Twitter account, for example, so we assume he was marking a target for his bots or even friends which he has got a couple of). We found images that were also present in the 4plebs archive.

The way we discovered their website was through a @_g01m_ Twitter account. It had pictures of US airplanes which were used to flood /egg/ threads as well. Both @laxog_poppy and @_g01m_ accounts had Los Angeles listed as their location. WHOIS showed that g01m.rocks is hosted in Los Angeles as well. However, it was not hosted by a company like Linode, Amazon, or similar. It was hosted by NetActuate which a) does not work with random anons, b) does not let one know pricing since they have to contact the company through a form on their website. As per NetActuate's catalogue, the cheapest price one would have to pay for a place in their North Carolina data center is $399/month.

Worth mentioning that G01M reacted aggresively when we learned about the NetActuate connection. After anons dug deeper and learned about Ronald/Daniel Shiflet, some threads were deleted and bots ceased their operations. Shiflet likes horror fiction while our somebody from G01M was bragging about Pulitzer he won at some point in his life. We located an author on Amazon called Ron Shiflet and his books were Lovecraft-related and horror-themed. G01M, it seems, is also a brand used by Anonymous (those guys who hack, not 4chan posters). They have a video on YouTube that was directed by Chris Finn, a Los Angeles-based art director who also had made a commercial for ExxonMobil and Amazon Echo. We also found that one of the people affiliated with Shiflet is David Nicol (@tipjar) who created a micropayment service Tip Jar in 1996.

We learned the methodology of bots' work through observations. The reason G01M team got angry when their bots were denied (You)s is because they - (You)s - are used as a scope; when bots receive a reply, this means they are supposed to analyze and train on a post/thread that references their post(s). When /egg/ anons organized in this approach, we noticed that G01M team members were pointing bots to the anons' posts manually. This also proved that G01M bot network was operating on other boards apart from /pol/. lax0gpoppy also started larping as a genuine anon but was found out very fast. When the /egg/ thread got deleted, British anon started the first 4CHAN IS COMP'D thread out of three (thread #2; the third one was killed as well after someone posted this). There, we spotted a bot triggering to a phrase "Ubisoft games" and a shadowwarfare.info link.

One of the /egg/ threads created by G01M was sent to archive 4 minutes after the last reply. First of all, the 4chan archive timer is set to 30 minutes of inactivity by default. Secondly, the bot network was being exposed in the thread which resulted in bots flooding it with off-topic garbage thus pushing it closer the bump limit. In the aforementioned 4CHAN IS COMP'D thread, we verified that threads are not sent to an archive 9 minutes after the last reply, which once again proved that G01M has access to moderator toolset.

We could not help noticing that G01M took extra pride in chasing Islamic State supporters' accounts on the Internet. This fact was eventually used as a weapon against the group.
By the way, the more people openly picked up on obvious derailing attempts, the faster G01M resorted to either deleting threads or flooding them with garbage and then leaving /pol/ for a while.

Apart from the British anon's testimony that he is being spied on, we came across the following piece. The page from realtruenews.org referenced in the screenshot says that everything in the image is made up and untrue. To believe it or not is up to the reader.

FOXACID is NSA's tool, Magic Lantern is FBI's tool. MMSE stands for Mini-Mental State Examination; the score of 22 requires some supervision. AMTS is Abbreviated mental test score, Wiki says "A score of 7–8 or less suggests cognitive impairment at the time of testing".

Arguably, the NSA may not be involved directly. Shadow Brokers released the source code and CTR (Correct The Record) simply used it (however, neither can we confirm nor refute this claim). More on FOXACID here.

System's infiltration into 4chan is quite acute. We have proofs showing that people in the image were behind the most recent (as of the beginning of October 2019) mass shootings in the United States. It would be beneficial for one to reference this and this posts on 4plebs (both were deleted). The former one has a conversation between, presumably, a 4chan/8chan insider that exposes the malicious intents of mods (post #225059752) and the other mod that is working against /ourguy/. Keep in mind that by that time mods were already spotted flooding /pol/. Also, El Paso shooting was not a story of just one guy. This points to the conclusion that mods are genuine glowniggers. Additionally, the original exposure of mods being behind the attacks happened on August 29, that is one day prior to one of the mods (we assume it is the said /ourguy/) "killing himself".

It is worth checking this thread for details. There was a thread on 8chan's /irc/ with a discussion of inner 4chan mods' communication in which they were discussing the destruction of 4chan most "problem[atic]" boards (https://archive.is/4EGmi, https://archive.is/x13m6, and also check Archive.org's links for /pol/res/12102567.html on 8chan).

When Tarrant did his part in the ongoing RAHOWA, his case was pushed on /pol/ by Jews (not exclusively, of course), and we think the intention was to make not-yet-crusaders more confident thus provoking even more violence. Had they really continued Tarrant's cause, this would probably have resulted in further Internet censorship, tightening of gun policies, and marginalization of white nationalism. Additionally, 8chan posters are different from 4chan posters so chances they would follow Brenton's example are somewhat higher.

In 2014, when GamerGate was a major happening, mods tried to suppress all anons' struggle to seek the truth and punish the corrupt. These images explain how exactly 4chan was slowly rotting to its current state as well as has a certain chunk of internal logs. The reason why the System has been so aggressive towards 4chan ever since is explained in the second image from the top in this article.

Sometimes, moderators larped as regular anons and pushed certain narrative. However, they were making certain mistakes rendering their credibility/cover void.

In fact, a coordinated System's effort took place after attempted suicide of Kassie Washington (for fairness, it is possible that this person does not even exist; still, this does not negate anything written so far). Lots of moderators from different imageboards and even subreddits had to leave or were kicked out of their positions in a very short period of time.

The following part of the article is devoted to 4chan's administration. Large chunk of the information provided below is based on old data. More here (archive) and here.

First RapeApe's dox. RapeApe is reportedly a member of the Canadian Conservative party which can — though not necessarily — mean that the dox is incorrect (worth mentioning it was reported to be such). His email address on 4chan is grapeape@4chan.org (alternative: graben@motsoftware.orz). There was information that he is also a woman but we doubt it (though there were/are women in 4chan's moderator team. FWG, for example, because of whom 4chan was hacked by an Australian anon in 2014) since an /irc/ anon mentioned he served in the army. The domain where alternative email is hosted is not supported anymore (at the very least, HTTP-server is not working). However, there is Spanish motsoftware.com. MotSoftware provides IT services for small companies. LinkedIn.

RapeApe gets head admin rights from m00t.

Since September 2015, 4chan is owned by Hiroyuki. Hiroyuki was ousted from 2ch for selling user data to marketers, and censoring negative comments about several companies that had paid him to do so. After he was fired, he tried several tactics to gain control over 2ch including abusing DNS, DDOS and creating a fake version of 2ch that grabbed all the comments from the real 2ch automatically. His webcrawlers continue to mirror 2ch posts to this day, causing great strain on 2ch servers.

Hiroyuki and m00t connection.

m00t's mom doxx. Additionally, this is the Notice of Exempt Offering of Securities filed by m00t when he was working with the Canvas Networks Inc.

Short biography of 4chan moderators.

An outdated list of participants of jannieteam IRC channel.

This is a closed board on 4chan for jannies, mods, and admins. Kazisho's Tumblr blog (also https://archive.is/mnapr and https://web.archive.org/web/20170113015127/https://www.youtube.com/user/Kazisho). He was/is responsible for moderating /pol/.

Troid's doxx.

I_AM_ABIB's doxx.

ALTERNATIVE's doxx does not have infographics. His Twitter (what it looked like before he closed it), Instagram, Gawker account, Jam (archive), Twitch.

His possible IRL connection (archive), https://twitter.com/emilysu (archive). The guy (archive) he has been communicating (archive) with at least on Twitter on a regular basis since August 2009.

There was also a happening around Otakon 2010 where ALTERNATIVE was mentioned.

invisibro's doxx. Rachel Beider is apparently his girlfriend or fiance. Also, take a look at who he is replying (archive) to on Twitter. Reading this (archive) may be crucial for understanding.

invisibro's parents doxx.

These were in the same thread but some posts were deleted so who these people are remains unknown.

More sources to go through.

Another example of 4chan administration conspiracy is that other threads related to PizzaGate were deleted from /pol/ as well, even though topic of symbolism in pop-culture was an important part of it. This made us think that the scale of warfare is not narrowed to /egg/ exclusively. Nuff said, /pol/ is flooded with threads that are not compliant to the board rules in the stickied post.

It also prevented legitimate anon activities from being done. For instance, after applying certain changes to the /egg/ template pastebin, mod issued a ban for posting off-topic.

Moderators applied (and still do) selective censorship. Apart from already discussed GamerGate and PizzaGate threads, /SIG/ (Self-Improvement General) was kicked out of /pol/. At the same time, black pride threads (not generals but those where malicious actors merely posted pictures of whites dating negroes) not only were left untouched but their opposition was actively being suppressed.

Apart from corrupt moderators, there were also other groups of people that are attacking the imageboard even today. They consist of Discord trannies, Stormfront users, just trolls, and other actors trying out their bots.

We found information somewhat proving that NSA is involved in 4chan's life. In 2013, when Edward Snowden leaked classified documents from the NSA to the public, anons noticed a highly suspicious use of bots not only on /pol/ but also /r9k/ and other boards.

The most famous group is part of the System and consists of Correct The Record and ShareBlue. Below is the list of what Anon has dug on the two.

Information here is dated back to 2016 closer to the US elections. See this page if you want to dig.

CTR personnel. CTR is linked to James Alefantis' (yes, the one from PizzaGate) boyfriend David Brock who also founded Media Matters. Both were pushing pro-Clinton narrative.

At some point Shareblue and CTR employees came forward with confessions.

Even though 4chan has such large problems, 8chan is not perfect either (more on this here (archive) and here (archive)). However, it was enough for the System to give an order to shut it down.

A good place that can help you take a look at the way the System works can be found here.