In the wake of the Okaloosa School threats, the Witchfinder reveals that an absence of US law enforcement activity over sinister website Kiwi Farms has led to further vigilante threats, including a detailed guide to retaliatory harassment of the operator and the sending of false anthrax packages. Josh Moon has had many enemies on the chan boards and elsewhere for some time, long before I wrote about the site. Their opposition to Kiwi Farms and Moon shows every sign of intensifying.

Escambia County. On the left, Joshua Conner Moon with a small child. Perhaps it is one of the children Kiwi Farms recently voted to target. On the right a terrorist with Anthrax. Center – Sheriff David Morgan looks on. Image used under the UK Parody exception pursuant to s30A Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. Child is a stock image from Dreamstime.

Last week, Hertfordshire police received a menacing email trying to imply I was a criminal. They immediately realised it was fake, and put it in to their technical unit for tracing. It was not the first time. Needless to say it seemd to come from a domain owned by Joshua Conner Moon, the operator of the ‘GamerGate.us’ email service, which falsely poses as the #GamerGate movement for trolling purposes.

Joshua Moon’s site Kiwi Farms has been increasingly controversial for some time now due to its explicit targeting of preteen children and the disabled, as well as high profile individuals like former Nintendo PR Alison Rapp. In my initial article on the subject, I documented how multiple hosting companies had banned the site. French hosting company Gandi.net expressly confirmed that Kiwi Farms was banned after child pornography was found.

In a later article, with links and archives, I provided evidence that Kiwi Farms were openly organising frightening forged emails to women, in the name of other women and with penis photos and similar attached. A member boasted of organising SWATtings and one screenshotted a massacre threat they sent to Hertfordshire police. The same article linked to a vote taken on Kiwi Farms to target under age children and gave an example of their doing exactly that by harvesting family photos of a 5-year old boy. Clearly many of these activities are illegal under Federal United States and Florida law.

Most message boards that provide questionable content avoid participation and rely on immunity under section 230 of the United States Communications Decency Act 1996. Case law shows that this immunity can be lost if you join in the fray and participate by creating editorial content, which of course Moon does on a regular basis. He would be well advised to read this article here (archive here).

Joshua Conner Moon’s activities are no secret. His home address in Florida is easily available merely by typing his name into Google. It is well known in law enforcement circles that appearing to tolerate or ignore a crime will cause it to escalate. It was this doctrine that led to the ‘zero tolerance’ dogma that served New York City so well. This perception of lawlessness had always led to retaliation, but as Kiwi Farms has grown it appears the conflict has now reached critical mass.

A week or so ago I was tipped off that two anonymous image boards had started incest story threads about Joshua Conner Moon and his mother Candice Lynn Potter. The thread was very much in the style of Moon’s own board, Kiwi Farms, with he and his mother singled out for systematic and degrading humiliation as users competed to write about the various ways that he and his mother, ‘love each other’.

The authors wrote in the most intimate terms, one beginning, “Candice was wet. Try as she might, her thoughts turned again and again […]”. Obviously as an ethical blogger I find this deplorable – I even refused to link to the site on my blog or wiki. Even so this is exactly the kind of thing that Kiwi Farms under Josh has been doing for some time. Although I refuse to participate I have no sympathy for Moon.

It is clear that the agenda is to instil fear and humiliation exactly the same as Kiwi Farms tries to instil in its victims – often trying to make them join the forums and give up further details about themselves. The thread urges users not to email or text the thread address to Moon or his family and provides some addresses not to write to.

On Monday afternoon this website received a further tip-off about a thread posted earlier that day, entitled, “The Guide to Harassing Joshua Conner Moon and Candice Lynn Potter”. The thread had already been archived. Again this site deplores such activities will not link to it for ethical reasons. However it is easily found with Google or archive.is searches for Monday 23/05/2016 on  some of the smaller chan sites.

The thread gives detailed instructions on how to avoid detection, advising would-be vigilantes to use TOR and third party sites such as a fake email website that is said to be in Eastern Europe, to allow TOR and to not keep logs. A wealth of email addresses and phone numbers for the Moon family are provided.

More sinisterly the guide even sets out in detail how to send fake anthrax to buildings and public services in the county where Moon lives. Whilst the guide suggests harmless materials like flour there is no guarantee that channers will not use toxic or caustic substances.

The channers’ plan is as sophisticated as it is cruel. The target audience for the post is clearly the large number of vulnerable people, offenders and children targeted by Kiwi Farms – the so-called, ‘LOLCows’. Inevitably, all of these people have a beef with Moon and better yet from the perspective of the channers, some of them are sex-offenders. All of these people are motivated and will remain so as long as Kiwi Farms exists meaning that the harassment will never ‘peter out’ as Moon hopes.

I have often compared Kiwi Farms to Hunter Moore’s website. “Is Anyone Up?” ran for two years during which Moore received many threats as well as physical confrontations. Moore went to jail in 2015, to serve a sentence of between 2 and 7 years in federal prison. Like “Is Anyone Up?”, Kiwi Farms depends on an ever growing number of enemies although even Moore was not stupid enough to choose the such a potentially unstable victims pool.

Like Moore, Moon does not appear to have fully considered the likely outcomes of his actions including (for example) the possibility of an enraged parent or mentally ill victim attending his home with a 12-gauge. The harassment guide is simply another manifestation of the entirely predictable outcomes of Moon’s decisions.

Similarly to memes such as ‘7 proxies’ or ‘creepypasta’, it is likely the guide to harassing Joshua Moon will become an immortal part of the internet, preserved in archives and pastebins, ever growing and improving.

Thanks to his wrongdoing Joshua Moon, his mother Candice and other relatives such as Bill and Darleen will have to plan for regular menacing emails and calls. They will have to plan for anonymous perpetrators to contact their neighbours with vile and cruel allegations about Josh and his family. Worse, as the curious recipients of the information look into it they will find that there is fire under the smoke and that Josh is far from innocent.

Employers such as Candice’s employers at Keller Williams will have to plan for bomb-threats and other interference, especially as Candice is effectively subsidising Moon’s unemployed lifestyle running his harassment board. They will have to plan for the fact that any investigation will quickly reveal the embarrassing source of the provocation.

Worse, arresting any given perpetrator is unlikely to help as they will soon be replaced by another (and another) (and another) as Josh enrages more people. I once saw a Kiwi Farms user boast the signature, “Will stalk you forever and ruin your family”. How ironic that this is the fate now suffered by Joshua Moon.

Even so it is completely unjust that vulnerable and disabled victims of Moon’s site must continue to suffer as his life crumbes, nor is it fair that the people of Escambia have to put up with it. What reasonable person wants a creepy neighbour whose presence attracts terrorists, sex-offenders and the mentally vulnerable?

More importantly, why are Escambia Sheriff David Morgan (dmorgan@escambiaso.com) and local FBI boss John Canning (john.canning@ic.fbi.gov) not acting to deal with Moon? There is no shortage of evidence. This site deplores criminal vigilantism but encourages victims and opponents of Kiwi Farms to contact the authorities.

ADDENDUM 26/05/2016 – For ethical information about the owner of Kiwi Farms but without incitement to harassment or other unlawful materials, readers can check out the new Kiwi Farms Wiki, which has a page for Kiwi Farms owner Joshua Conner Moon and a growing page for his mother Candice Lynn Potter.