Chapter 5 > Terri TickleTerri Tickle
5.2. Terri TickleTerri Tickle
Just as Hoffmann was launching her Empire Towers page in April 2001, an anti-spammer who called himself Rob Mitchell was putting the crowning touches on a spammer-tracking web site he had been building for three years.
Mitchell was also considered obsessive by some Nanae participants for his painstaking research into the subject of his site: a chronic spammer who used the online nickname "Terri DiSisto" and claimed to be a female college student in Massachusetts.
Unlike most junk emailers, DiSisto wasn't littering the Internet in hopes of selling something. Instead, her ads offered payment in the form of cash and computer or audio equipment to young men between eighteen and twenty-three who mailed her videos of themselves being tickled.
DiSisto's bizarre story began around 1996, when she started spamming obscure newsgroups including alt.sex.fetish.tickling with her ads. "No sex or nudity are ever wanted in my videos," stated the spams. "I just want to see guys tied up and mercilessly, relentlessly TICKLED!" DiSisto claimed she enjoyed tickling as a hobby and was not interested in real-life encounters with her video subjects.
"I have a boyfriend, full cadre of friends, and plenty of guys to tickle already. I AM NOT LOOKING TO MEET OR TICKLE ANY GUYS ENCOUNTERED FROM CYBERSPACE!" stated the ads. College-aged men who stepped up to the offer were told to send the finished products to post office boxes in New York or Massachusetts and were given elaborate instructions on how to produce the videos.
"When laughter begins, the tickler must ask the question, 'How ticklish are you here?'" explained DiSisto's instructions. "The tickled guy—while still being tickled—must respond in as much of a complete sentence or sentences as possible (e.g., avoiding responses like 'very' or 'not too much' in favor of 'I'm totally ticklish under my arms...'). No one- or two-word answers."
DiSisto also detailed her offer, as well as excerpts from videos and audiotapes she had received, at her web site, tickling.com. The site featured a photograph of an attractive young blonde woman, purportedly DiSisto, in an over-the-shoulder, yearbook pose.
In a misguided effort at target marketing, DiSisto began repeatedly posting her ads in newsgroups frequented by young men, such as rec.sports.paintball and rec.music.phish, a discussion board for fans of the rock group Phish. To avoid complaints that her messages were off topic and inappropriate, DiSisto posted offers of free tickets to Phish concerts in New York City to qualified young men who sent her videos.
But participants nonetheless began to complain about DiSisto's flagrant violation of newsgroup etiquette. As the complaints piled up, anti-spammer Morely Dotes declared a Usenet Death Penalty against DiSisto in 1997, which meant that newsgroup administrators all over the Internet would immediately cancel any of her postings to Usenet.
Consumed by a belief that she had a right to act out her fetish anywhere in cyberspace, DiSisto began to fight back.
First, she started indiscriminately spamming her ads to email users all over the Internet. Then she dropped "binary bombs"—encoded messages designed to flood and disrupt a discussion group—on rec.music.phish and other forums where regulars had told her she was unwelcome. DiSisto also retaliated directly against individuals who griped about her tickling ads, deluging them with thousands of emails over the course of a few hours. She similarly used email bombs to take revenge on people who had second thoughts after agreeing to make videos for her.
When a Massachusetts high school student named Sean Gallagher stopped sending her videos after he graduated and went off to college, DiSisto bombed his personal email account and that of Gallagher's friend, who was attending Suffolk University in Boston. DiSisto similarly bombed the email account of Suffolk administrators, forging the messages so they appeared to come from Gallagher's friend. The attacks completely disabled Suffolk's email system on three occasions. Similar retaliatory bombings knocked out the mail servers of at least two other universities.
Rob Mitchell was dragged into the bizarre world of "Terri Tickle" in early October of 1998. Thirty-nine at the time and a public school teacher in Huntsville, Texas, Mitchell had heard about DiSisto's spamming and email bombings on a web-based message board. In a posting on his own board, which Mitchell had created for discussions of humorous fiction, Mitchell criticized DiSisto for harassing people who had no interest in providing her videos.
Somehow, DiSisto learned about Mitchell's comments and decided to retaliate. She sent thousands of spams with the subject line, "A message board for TICKLISH GAY GUYS." The body of the messages invited recipients who "would enjoy conversing and sharing stories/experiences involving tickling" to visit a web address—Mitchell's—listed in the spam.
Within an hour, complaints began appearing on Mitchell's board from people livid over receiving the spam. In the course of an afternoon, people posted over 200 angry comments. Meanwhile, reports about the spam were appearing on several Usenet newsgroups, including alt.kill.spammers. The next day, when Mitchell tried to access his board, he learned that the ISP hosting the service had terminated his account.
That was when Mitchell became DiSisto's most formidable opponent and an ardent anti-spammer.
Over the course of nearly three years, Mitchell tussled with DiSisto in newsgroups and eventually over IRC chats and emails. As he tried to warn Internet users about the dangers of getting involved in DiSisto's fetish, she publicly accused him of being gay and being jealous of her video collection. All the while, Mitchell was compiling evidence of her spamming and other Internet abuses. He studied every DiSisto email message header he could get his hands on and determined that she used accounts with at least sixteen different ISPs to send her ads and her mail bombs.
Mitchell posted his findings to Nanae and other groups under the title "Terri DiSisto: a History in URLs." Yet his initial reception in Nanae was decidedly hostile. Many anti-spammers considered both DiSisto and Mitchell kooks cut from the same cloth.
"Why don't you just marry her or shoot her or do something else reasonable?" suggested a veteran anti-spammer who used the online nickname Rebecca Ore. "Really, we know she's bad. Just some of us think there are spammers who are several orders of magnitude worse," Ore added.
Mitchell realized that DiSisto was a relatively small-time spammer who bulked out messages by the tens of thousands, not by the millions like some of the big players. But her crimes went well beyond spamming and made her, in his opinion, one of the worst individual abusers of the Internet.
But that argument mostly fell on deaf ears in Nanae. Even Steve Atkins, a veteran spam fighter and creator of the SamSpade.org site, which Mitchell relied on to analyze and track DiSisto's spams, dismissed his explanation: "Bollocks...You just have a thing about tickling."
Eventually DiSisto began visiting Nanae and became a regular participant. She alternated between trying to engage anti-spammers in rational discussions about her online behavior and taunting them with S.S. Titanic-derived metaphors about their inability to get her web site disconnected for more than a few days at a time.
"Tickling.com remains, I assure you, UNSINKABLE," DiSisto bragged in a January 2000 posting to Nanae. "But like any great ship," she added, "there can be periodic difficulties in the engine room."
Shortly afterwards, DiSisto announced that she had located two television production firms in California that were making the videos she wanted. As a result, she claimed she no longer would advertise for tickling videos via email or Usenet spam.
"There is NO NEED to look for guys randomly out here in cyberspace. I haven't done it in months. I don't intend to do it anytime soon. I think my disappearance from the spam scene deserves notice," she wrote.
If DiSisto believed the public announcement of her retirement from spamming would somehow erase her past, she was wrong. In fact, her Internet notoriety had already caught the attention of Reader's Digest magazine, which planned to include her in a forthcoming article about online harassment. Hal Karp, a reporter for the magazine, contacted Mitchell that January after encountering his "History in URLs" postings to Nanae.
Karp said the story would focus on a group called Cyber Angels, which had assisted one of DiSisto's mail-bombing victims. As Mitchell traded notes with Karp, he sensed the reporter was sitting on information that would blow the DiSisto case wide open. But Karp was keeping his cards close to the vest, and at one point he even said he had to be careful so as not to jeopardize an investigation by law enforcement.
When the April 2000 issue of Reader's Digest was published, Karp's article didn't cite Mitchell or his Nanae postings. Nor did it mention tickling.com or the surname DiSisto, referring instead only to "a woman named Terri." According to the article, the woman cyber-stalked a young Internet user, pseudonymously named Gary, hoping to get him to sell her a video of himself bound and tickled. When Gary refused, she bombed him with over 30,000 emails. Then, one night as Gary was discussing his situation in a chat room, someone claiming to be a Cyber Angel offered to help him track and research his stalker.
"The hunter was now the hunted," wrote Karp, who reported that the anonymous Cyber Angel helped Gary uncover some shocking information. According to the article, "he learned that Terri was not a female college student, but a man...One night Gary tracked Terri online and revealed what he knew. The harassment screeched to a halt."
The article left Mitchell stunned. All along, he had occasionally wondered about DiSisto's gender, but how was Gary able so quickly to dig up information that Mitchell and others had failed to find over several years?
While unsatisfying to Mitchell, the article gave him hope that DiSisto was about to be publicly unmasked. Surely if Gary knew her real identity, it would just be a matter of time before federal authorities would act on the information. To assist in that process, Mitchell gathered up his "History in URLs" pages from Nanae and published them at a web page he created, which he entitled "Project Iceberg."
What Karp hadn't revealed in his article was that DiSisto's victim Gary had provided the reporter with an archive of electronic files apparently stolen from DiSisto's computer by a hacker in late 1999. The files included a trove of incriminating data such as a resumé bearing DiSisto's true name and address, a file containing her social security number, and correspondence and other personal documents. Also contained in the archive was a newsgroup posting Mitchell had made with instructions on how to report DiSisto for spamming.
Karp hadn't disclosed the information, or how he obtained it, primarily because of the liability concerns of the magazine's lawyers. But he handed over the files, as well as a pile of other evidence he had dug up on DiSisto, to the FBI shortly after his article was published.
Meanwhile, DiSisto tried in public to spin the Reader's Digest article as a work of fiction aimed at entertaining readers.
"I think you'll find the overall impact of the article rather disappointing," she told Nanae participants.
But clearly the piece had staggered DiSisto. Soon after it appeared she stopped posting to Nanae and retreated instead to newsgroups devoted to tickling, including one she had created herself, alt.multimedia.tk.terri-disisto.
Mitchell was ready to move on. He turned his attention to spamware vendor Andrew Brunner, on whom he composed a series of Nanae postings familiarly entitled "Andrew Brunner: A History in URLs." The articles documented the combative Brunner's online machinations since 1998. For his efforts, Shiksaa offered Mitchell a new email address using her domain: spicy_crust@chickenboner.com.
But Mitchell had not heard the last from "Terri Tickle."
Chapter 5 > David D'Amato, the Titanic Spammer
5.4. David D'Amato, the Titanic Spammer
In early 2001, anti-spammer Rob Mitchell continued to watch tickling fetishist and spammer Terri DiSisto's online activities out of the corner of his eye. When he did mention DiSisto, he referred to him as "Terrance." But Mitchell had almost given up hope that the law would ever catch up to the strange spammer.
Then, in March of 2001, Mitchell got a phone call from Reader's Digest reporter Hal Karp. The reporter told him that federal prosecutors in Massachusetts had quietly announced a plea agreement with David D'Amato, a guidance counselor and assistant principal at West Hempstead High School on Long Island.
The 39-year-old D'Amato had pled guilty to misdemeanor charges of email bombing computers at Suffolk University in Boston and James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The U.S. Attorney's press release didn't mention D'Amato's Terri DiSisto persona or the spams for videos. But Karp assured Mitchell the feds had found their man and said D'Amato was facing up to a year in prison and fines of over $100,000 on each count, with sentencing scheduled for July.
Mitchell surfed to the West Hempstead High web site. There, at the top of the home page, was D'Amato's name. As an educator himself, Mitchell was aghast at the thought of a sadistic spammer and online harasser like D'Amato working in schools most of his adult life.
"Such a person should never be in charge of children in any capacity ever again," wrote Mitchell at his Project Iceberg site.
Newsday, a daily paper serving the greater New York metropolitan area, was among the first to publish a photograph of D'Amato. Taken from the West Hempstead High yearbook, the photo showed the plump, unsmiling assistant principal seated in his office. D'Amato's balding pate and jowls made him look older than his years.
"Ewwww. He looks like Truman Capote," was Shiksaa's response after Mitchell posted a link to the photograph on Nanae.
Karen Hoffmann chimed in as well when she saw the photo: "MY GOD, could he have been any uglier?"
Another anti-spammer used the image to create a parody playbill for the movie Titanic, which Shiksaa posted at her site Chickenboner.com. It showed D'Amato's head, juxtaposed with the female image of Terri DiSisto above the luxury ocean liner. Superimposed over the ship were the words "Titanic Spammer" and "A Rob Mitchell Film."
Even Rebecca Ore, who had originally expressed skepticism about Mitchell's obsession with DiSisto, had come around. She encouraged victims to travel to Boston for D'Amato's sentencing. "All that's remaining is for people who want to see him do active time to show up and let the judge know how much damage he did," she said.
To the amazement of Mitchell and many other people following the case, D'Amato continued to work at West Hempstead High for nearly two weeks after signing the plea agreement. The school district suspended D'Amato only after Three Village Times, the hometown paper, acted on a tip from Karp and confronted school officials about D'Amato. They admitted they had heard nothing about the charges until that point.
Karp suspected that D'Amato's attorneys had negotiated a deal to tone down the government's press release and to keep it devoid of sensational details. Clearly, D'Amato was getting good legal representation. D'Amato's father, George, was the head of a big Wall Street law firm. And his lawyer, Tracy A. Miner, was one of the top defense lawyers around and president of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
Karp concluded that George D'Amato was financially supporting his son, who lived in a swanky penthouse in Garden City, New York, well beyond the means of most public-school administrators.
When FBI agents raided the apartment in June of 2000, D'Amato admitted he was DiSisto and detailed how he performed the mail-bomb attacks. He said he used CyberCreek's Avalanche software to send the messages through open mail relays. He also admitted to registering numerous post office boxes and telephone numbers under false names as part of his tickling video schemes. Later, in a hearing held at the time of his plea bargain, D'Amato told the court he had been under the care of a psychiatrist since January of 2000 for Internet addiction and job-related stress.
The Three Village Times article revealed that D'Amato had submitted his resignation to the school months prior to being exposed as Terri DiSisto. He had planned to leave in order to attend law school the coming autumn at his father's alma mater, Fordham. The news troubled Mitchell. Impersonating lawyers was one of the tricks DiSisto had used to scare off anti-spammers and others who complained about his spamming and abuse.
"A more unfit person to enter the legal profession I cannot imagine," concluded Mitchell in Project Iceberg.
Fordham Law School apparently reached a similar conclusion following D'Amato's sentencing in July 2001.
At the hearing, D'Amato stood up and addressed the court: "Your honor, I would like to express my remorse and sorrow." He apologized to his parents, who were present, and to "every person in this courtroom who may have been impacted." D'Amato pleaded to the court for "mercy and compassion."
Prosecutors had provided the judge with a small stack of letters from DiSisto's online victims. The letters were gathered by Charles Dirksen, a San Francisco attorney and regular participant in the rec.music.phish newsgroup, who had put out an online call for testimony on behalf of prosecutors.
"I realize there are (inarguably) far more important things to get excited about these days...than putting a twisted, deviant spammer in jail for a year or two," Dirksen wrote in an April posting to the newsgroup. "But nevertheless, as Phish fans, we have the chance to help put someone in prison who trashed our online community and harassed, threatened and insulted many of our fellow fans repeatedly and persistently."
Before sentencing D'Amato, the judge asked whether anyone in the courtroom wished to speak about his or her experiences with the defendant. But no one rose to the occasion—not even Sean Gallagher, the student who had been mail-bombed by DiSisto. He was present in the courtroom but apparently content just to watch the proceedings.
The lenient sentence finally handed down by the judge disappointed many who had followed the case. Noting that D'Amato had already paid over $20,000 in restitution to Suffolk and James Madison universities, the judge spared D'Amato jail time for his violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Instead, he ordered D'Amato to spend six months in a halfway house. The judge specifically stipulated that D'Amato's incarceration should not interfere with his law school classes or mental health counseling. The order also didn't place any restrictions on D'Amato's Internet use.
But a wrench was thrown into the works when officials at Fordham, apparently awakened to the controversy surrounding D'Amato, balked and withdrew their offer to admit him. Despite protests from D'Amato's attorney, the judge revised the sentence.
Instead of spending his days at Fordham's midtown Manhattan campus—just a block from Central Park and the Lincoln Center for the Arts—D'Amato would be booked that August into the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he would stay for three months until being transferred to a medium-security facility in Fairton, New Jersey. D'Amato would serve out the remaining two and a half months of his sentence in Fairton and be released in February of 2002.
For Mitchell, the conclusion of the case left many questions unresolved, such as how D'Amato had acquired his spamming and mail-bombing skills and whether he worked alone or had accomplices. Similarly, serious doubts remained for Karp about whether investigators had missed evidence of pedophilia in D'Amato's past. The assistant principal's resumé showed him to be a job hopper, having changed schools eight times in eleven years. Karp worried that D'Amato's short stints at each school were the result of his being quietly let go due to misconduct that administrators decided was best to sweep under a rug, rather than face a lawsuit from D'Amato.
But those questions would stay unanswered, and Mitchell had to be content with knowing that Terri DiSisto would never again appear online.
"The era of the Internet presence of Terri DiSisto is at an end, forever," he wrote as the final entry to his Project Iceberg site.
But then in early August, just days before D'Amato was incarcerated, Mitchell was surprised to receive a rambling email from the man. The message came from an email address he didn't recognize, and the headers showed it was sent from a public library in Brooklyn.[]
A history major in college, D'Amato had frequently compared their online battles to those of opposing generals in the American Revolutionary War, and in his message that day he acknowledged that Mitchell had been a worthy opponent.
"Everything is going to turn out just fine," said the former guidance counselor, noting that he still had his permanent certification from the New York State Education Department.
Annoyed, Mitchell sent a terse reply stating that he had grown weary of D'Amato's analogies. He said D'Amato seemed in denial about what he had done and what lay ahead of him. But D'Amato apparently had no desire for introspection. He wrote back to say he was disappointed not to see Mitchell at his sentencing in Boston, and he invited Mitchell to meet him someday in New York.
When Mitchell finally responded, he said he'd try to look up D'Amato if his travels ever took him to the Northeast. But Mitchell never received a reply.
Excerpted from S*PAM KiNgS by Brian McWilliams, published by O'REILLY MEDIA, INC. in 2005
ISBN: 0-596-00732-9
Click here to visit the expose' site of David D'Amato