Journalists nationwide were miffed on Wednesday after New York Congressman and Super Mario Bros. Mini-boss Peter King explicitly called on the Department of Justice to go after Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald for publishing classified documents revealing how much the NSA has been spying on all of us. This is almost certainly not going to happen, and would be a huge injustice if it did. But it got us wondering: Since the Obama Administration is clamping down on leaks with the dangerous zeal of a snapping turtle latching onto a toddler's pinky at a petting zoo, what is the best way for enterprising journalists to reveal important classified information to the world without being caught up in a nasty espionage investigation?

Know the Law

The first thing to understand is that the Administration's War On Leaks has been pursued under an expansive reading of the poorly written Espionage Act of 1917, which makes it illegal to leak "defense information" with the intent of harming the U.S. or aiding it enemies. (Back in 1917, it was probably leaking by... steam engine?)

Obama has charged six people who leaked classified information to the media under the law, more than all others presidents combined. The biggest possible liability for journalists would probably be a conspiracy charge under the Espionage Act. This was driven home in the case of Fox News reporter James Rosen, who was labled and treated like "an aider, an abettor, and/or co-conspirator" during an investigation into a leak of North Korean intelligence, basically for doing an especially good job at grooming a source inside the State Department. (He was never charged with a crime, and Attorney General Eric Holder later said that was never the plan.)

Don't Worry About It

But even with the War On Leaks in full swing, one veteran national security reporter I spoke to told me he doesn't worry about possible legal fallout while reporting on classified stories, and with good reason: No journalist has ever been charged under the Espionage Act, and it doesn't seem like they will soon. Even the Obama Administration's Department of Justice almost certainly won't risk the political furor of prosecuting a journalist under the Espionage Act, said Columbia Law School Professor David Pozen, who specializes in government leaks. Pozen told me there is a strong and long-standing notion in D.C. that journalists should be protected under the 1st Amendment, even when it comes to leaks.

"The legal risk to Greenwald seems minimal to me," Pozen said. "[Peter] King's statement seems to me an old trope that surfaces on all these controversies. It never goes there." Instead, Pozen said, it's the government sources who leak to journalists are really at risk.

Don't Brag About Classified Information

Still, the national security reporter said that it's probably a good idea to keep any classified information safely in your pocket unless it's absolutely necessary. He suggested that Rosen unnecessarily put himself in the DOJ's crosshairs by reporting the fact that the CIA had learned of a possible North Korean nuclear test from a CIA source inside North Korea, even though the CIA source bit wasn't central to the story. Fred Kaplan, in Slate, also criticized Rosen's choice to reveal the CIA source:

He could have written his story without revealing that nugget about the inside source. The story might have been a little less compelling; his audience might have wondered how he or his official contacts knew that a test was coming. But the U.S. government might also still have a decent intelligence source inside North Korea.

Don't Pay for Secrets

Probably the one really explicit bit of advice is: Don't try to buy classified documents as if they were so many videos of Canadian mayors smoking crack cocaine. Pozen told me some Constitutional scholars hypothesize that First Amendment protections would not suffice if journalists went beyond a typical journalist-source relationship. "A situation where it came out that a journalist enticed an otherwise unwilling source to reveal information—that might be a legally difficult one," he said. When I asked national security attorney Bradley Moss for his advice to journalists dealing with classified information, it was simple: "Don't offer money."

Documents Are More Dangerous Than Words

Moss also suggested that classified documents could probably get you in trouble more than classified gossip. As of 2009, there had only been one espionage case in history in which private citizens were prosecuted for alleged spying that didn't involve documents, according to the New York Times. That was the the case of Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, two lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) charged in 2004 with leaking government secrets to journalists and Israeli diplomats. They'd learned the information in conversations with U.S. officials then passed it along, in their role as lobbyists. The case fell apart in 2009, after it became clear that sending them to jail would basically criminalize all of D.C.

Don't Be a Megalomaniacal Albino Australian Hacker

There have been some reports that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been secretly indicted or targeted under the Espionage Act by a grand jury convened to investigate Bradley Manning's massive document dump. These are unconfirmed, but, according to Pozen, if he was charged it might be under the (wrong) idea that Wikileaks was not practicing journalism in its State Department cable leaks. "The government may have looked at: Is he a member of the media? I think there's some sense [in the government] that he may not qualify and then he wouldn't receive as much protection under the 1st Amendment," Pozen said. Greenwald is less likely to be the first journalist charged under the Espionage Act, because he works for a respected news agency.

[Photo via Getty; Image by Jim Cooke]

It seems to me a lot of the negative reviews of Taipei do not react to a specific artistic failing of the book but to the unpleasantness of reading it, which all reviewers report pretty uniformly. (I'm ignoring the many people who can't look beyond their distaste for Tao Lin the fameball self-publicist, obviously.) That's a matter of personal taste, not Lin's literary merit. Saying that Taipei is bad because it's boring is like saying a Stephen King novel is bad because it's scary. That's the whole point!

(Disclosure: I am a longtime Tao Lin fan—actually started reading his blog when Gawker started hating on him—and he gave me a free copy of Taipei and I also published him on Gawker once.)

It seems to me a lot of the negative reviews of Taipei do not react to a specific artistic failing of the book but to the unpleasantness of reading it, which all reviewers report pretty uniformly. (I'm ignoring the many people who can't look beyond their distaste for Tao Lin himself, obviously.) That's a matter of personal taste, not Lin's literary merit. Saying that Taipei is bad because it's boring is like saying a Stephen King novel is bad because it's scary. That's the whole point!

(Disclosure: I am a longtime Tao Lin supporter, and he gave me a free copy of Taipei and I also published him on Gawker once.)

One night this past December, sitting at his laptop in his bedroom in Winchester, Kentucky, Deric Lostutter donned a plastic Guy Fawkes mask, recently purchased on eBay. He turned on the camera of his souped-up gaming laptop and cued a computerized voice to start speaking.

"Greetings, citizens of the world," the pre-written script said. Behind his mask, Lostutter bobbed his head, as if he were speaking along. "We are Anonymous. We are KnightSec." He was no longer the hard-partying, chronically underemployed 26-year-old rapper who lived in his girlfriend's house on the outskirts of a small town. He was KYAnonymous, crusading leader of KnightSec, an offshoot of the infamous Anonymous hacktivist collective.

And KYAnonymous had a new cause. Lostutter had been reading a lot online about Steubenville, Ohio, where two members of the local high school football team stood charged with raping an intoxicated 16-year-old girl. "I literally actually cried over what they did to this girl," he told me recently. "Here is this bright, lovely young girl whose life is forever changed because these people wanted to have a good night, it's bullshit."

So rather than just angrily tweeting about it, Lostutter was declaring war on Steubenville. "Op Roll Red Roll Engaged," the computer voice warned ("Roll Red Roll" is Steubenville High’s slogan). "January 1st. Expect us." Lostutter posted the video to YouTube and tweeted it from his KYAnonymous Twitter account.

Not long after, one of KnightSec's supporters tweeted a photo back at him. "She was on the treadmill at the gym, and she took a picture, and on all the TVs on the wall, I was on every one," Lostutter said. "I was like, 'Fuck.'"

As KYAnonymous, Lostutter had already won some renown for KnightSec by attacking revenge-porn king Hunter Moore and helping shut down a Westboro Baptist Church protest. But the decision to take on the Steubenville case unleashed more powerful forces than he had ever encountered before: international outrage, legions of vigilante followers, and a glaring media spotlight.

It was KnightSec that would obtain the video of a Steubenville teen joking about the rape, turning an alcohol-blurred local crime into a visual that cable news could loop like disaster footage, crystallizing public opinion against the offenders. It was also KnightSec that helped create a toxically false, conspiratorial dossier on innocent parties surrounding the case.

And it was KYAnonymous himself who found an FBI tactical team in his driveway in April, preparing to search his home, investigating the hack of a website during the Steubenville campaign. When he called me at the end of May, telling me he'd been raided and that he wanted to tell his story, I flew to Kentucky to meet him. Was Anonymous' Steubenville campaign a righteous force for justice or an act of mass bullying, doing more harm than good in the town it targeted? I wanted to hear Lostutter's side of the story in the light of day, mask off.

On a recent Saturday, Lostutter slouched in a big sofa in the living room of his girlfriend's house. He wore jeans, and his scrawny tattooed arms poked out from a black t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of Nightshade Records, the tiny local record label that releases his rap albums. Lostutter is a proud country boy, owner of a small arsenal of firearms, a motorcycle, a blue Chevy pick-up, and a hyperactive pitbull named Thor that he swatted profanely off the couch whenever he jumped on it. Sliding glass doors offered a swaying panorama of chest-high bluegrass, in which sat a couple of outbuildings surrounded by clusters of vehicles and old farm equipment. This was not the stereotypical hacker hideout.

“I don't really get down with violence toward women or rape or anything like that,” Lostutter said. He was explaining why he’d felt the need to intervene in Steubenville. “It seemed to me like this girl was taken advantage of. And the people I used to run with and hang out with, and how I was raised, if you did this at my house, or the house I was at, I was going to kick your fucking ass. Period. I was going to take you outside and beat the hell out of you. I can't do that over the internet, so I did the next best thing.”

On April, 15th, the digital beatdown he’d help deliver over Steubenville came back to haunt him. Lostutter had just come back into the house from an early morning turkey hunt among the woods at the edge of the property when Thor jumped at the door. Lostutter opened it and saw what he thought was a FedEx truck. Instead, a swat team poured out, about a dozen guys in full tactical gear who told him to "get the fuck down."

"I got down in the driveway and I yelled at them not to shoot my dog—he jumps a lot but he don't bite," Lostutter said. His brother, who lives in the house too, was upstairs at the time and thought they were being robbed. "He had his .45 in his hand, so thank God he didn't get shot and die."

As Lostutter, his brother, and his brother's girlfriend stood handcuffed in the driveway, agents combed through the house and carted away electronics. An agent sat Lostutter down on the back porch.

"You know why we're here. Who are you?" the agent said.

"I'm KYAnonymous. I know why you're here," Lostutter replied.

During the Steubenville campaign, a Steubenville High School sports fansite had been hacked, and Lostutter was now caught up in the resulting hacking and identity theft investigation. As we talked about the raid, Lostutter's girlfriend came into the living room. (She had come home from work at the very end of the raid that day.) She asked nervously if I would be including where they lived in my article. Lostutter had made a lot more enemies than just the feds as KYanonymous, and she was afraid of what they'd do now that they knew his identity.

“You said half of Steubenville hates you,” she said to Lostutter. "I'm worried about my dogs, that someone's going to come and take my dogs or egg my house."

Lostutter isn’t worried about that. "I feel pretty comfortable in taking care of myself," he told me later. "I'm a registered gun owner. I've been in my share of scraps." He’d run briefly with a gang in Illinois, years ago. He keeps a pair of brass knuckles in the cupholder of his Chevy.

There is no right or wrong way to become Anonymous. It's a loosely-organized group that anyone can swear allegiance to with a hashtag. But the way Lostutter joined Anonymous was definitely not anonymous. One night in September, 2012, he got drunk and created a Kentucky Anonymous Facebook page, and a Twitter account which became his online handle: KYAnonymous. He didn't disable the location feature of Twitter at first so all of his tweets came labeled with "sent from Winchester, Kentucky."

"The rule is I should never be around a computer when I drink," he said.

Lostutter had long been interested in technology, but more in the nuts and bolts of computer hardware than hacktivist causes. His interest in Anonymous was sparked after watching the documentary We Are Legion on YouTube this past fall. We Are Legion tells the story of Anonymous' rise with triumphant hyperbole: Anonymous began as a mob of 16-year-olds mucking about in the cesspool of the online message board 4chan, harassing bloggers and trolling forums. Eventually, as We Are Legion tells it, Anonymous blossomed into noble Internet freedom-fighters, taking down Paypal to support Wikileaks, helping spark the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. (I have a brief appearance in We Are Legion.)

Lostutter had always been vocal about politics, arguing with friends at parties and on Facebook. He identifies as a "Constitutionalist.” He opposed the Iraq war, but is a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment who warns that Obama is trying to disarm U.S. citizens. He is a fan of Alex Jones.

“I was like damn, I do everything that these guys do without a mask already. I'm out here preaching all the wrong shit that's going on in the country,” he said. Anonymous, he decided, was where he belonged.

Lostutter has not had an easy life. His parents divorced when he was 7, and he spent the next few years bouncing between his father's house in North Carolina and his mother's in Illinois. During that time, Losutter said, his mother, an ex-Hell's Angel, went through a "pretty bad bout of alcoholism" and ended up in an abusive relationship. His dad "had some anger issues, and we didn't always see eye to eye." Lostutter graduated high school when he was 21.

A few years ago, he hit an especially rough patch. He spent a year homeless in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was working delivering pizza, sleeping in the car he used for his job.

"I'd just gone through a really bad breakup and so I was at the bars constantly, drinking heavily and partying, just trying to forget the fact that I was homeless to begin with," he said. In 2009 he moved to Winchester, where his mom lives, and started putting his life back together. He got a job at a pawnshop, where he met his current girlfriend. She'd come in looking for some stuff of hers' that had been stolen.

"That's the kind of person you want to date at a pawnshop—the one who's looking for stuff and not selling stuff," Lostutter said. "I invited her over, and she never left."

Last fall, his girlfriend’s father died and she inherited his big house on a few acres of property, which Lostutter refers to as The Farm. That’s where they live now. Lostutter took me on a tour of the grounds: We careened down a tiny path in his Chevy to a defunct railroad line, and fished half-heartedly on the banks of a lily pad-clogged pond while drinking Heinekens. “We’re gonna redneck you out,” he said.

In December, after he'd declared himself part of Anonymous, Lostutter learned that Hunter Moore was resurrecting his defunct revenge-porn site, Is Anyone Up. The first incarnation of Is Anyone Up caused a scandal in early 2012, but this time around it would be worse. Moore boasted to BetaBeat, it would include a mapping function that would lead people right to the door of the people who had been posted, nude, without their consent. Lostutter decided to take on Hunter Moore; his friend had been posted once on the old site and it had come close to ruining her life.

Lostutter threatened Moore on Twitter, and Moore responded with characteristic bluster: "You can't do shit my whole life is public. you fuckin tard."

So Lustutter launched Operation Hunt Hunter. He made a video with Anonymous’ spooky robot voice, warning Hunter Moore he would be held "accountable for his actions." He promoted it on Twitter and in Anonymous’ IRC chat rooms, and Operation Hunt Hunter took on a life of its own. Blogs and news sites picked up the story. Before long, Moore’s website was completely hacked, and his personal information leaked online. (Lostutter said he didn't hack it, and doesn't recall who did.) KYAnonymous was an online hero to anyone who hated Hunter Moore, which was pretty much everyone.

"It was kind of personal between me and Hunter Moore," Lostutter said. "My friend was on Is Anyone Up, and now you challenged me personally? You think you're a God? I'm gonna take you down a notch, I'm that kind of person."

The day after the hack, Lostutter tweeted from KYAnonymous, "#Knightsec has been born… add it to your bio.” Like Anonymous, anyone could be a part of KnightSec, but a rotating core of activists did most of the work. The name was a reappropriation of the slur “White Knight,” used by jaded internet trolls to mock naïve online do-gooders. As KYAnonymous, Lostutter was one of the leaders of Anonymous’ turn towards fighting rape and cyberbullying, an odd reformation for a group that started on 4chan.

Later in December, Michelle McKee, a 50-year-old survivor of sexual abuse, tweeted him information about Steubenville. He read up on the Steubenville case, which had already begun to draw attention from the national media, and was touched. Anyone who's been online in the last year knows the basics of Steubenville: Two football players, 17-year-old Trent Mays and 16-year-old Ma'lik Richmond, were charged with repeatedly raping a 16-year-old girl while she was drunk at a series of house parties on August 11th, 2012. Other students had tweeted callous jokes about the victim, and passed around photos and videos. A crusading crime blogger named Alexandria Goddard reposted the tweets, accusing the town of protecting the perpetrators and witnesses because they were popular football players. The New York Times picked the story. This past March, Mays and Richmond were found guilty, and a new grand jury has been convened to see if any other crimes were committed.

Lostutter said he could relate to the girl’s victimization at the hands of two football players, because his mother had once dated a guy who abused her. He also sensed something fishy with the lack of charges outside of the two players accused. Living in Winchester, where the highlight of the year is the annual Beer Cheese Festival, he knew how things worked in small towns. "The town of Steubenville has been good at keeping this quiet and their star football team protected," he wrote in KnightSec's first Steubenville statment. Sixteen witnesses refused to cooperate with the investigation.

He’d read online that witnessing a crime without reporting it was a misdemeanor, and he saw the callous jokes and photos shared by other students online. So why had the county sheriff told reporters he couldn't charge any of them?

"He was like, 'I don't know that they broke any other law than being stupid,'" Lostutter said. "You can't really be that fucking country to say that shit. I just Googled the law they broke!"

Lostutter began with the video because he knew this might catch the media’s attention and bring a spotlight on the case, just as it had to Hunter Moore. Lostutter is adamant that throughout his career as a hacktivist he never hacked anything himself. He was a hype man, making videos, launching campaigns, and obsessively tweeting about them—he would "weaponize the media," as he calls it, and inspire other people to join and do the dirty work.

“People go online and they read news sites because they want to know what's going on," he said. "And if it ain't from a reputable site then they ain't gonna believe it. So I gotta make sure that anything I do gets put on these reputable sites.”

In this case, Lostutter’s video went from his bedroom to national news so quickly because he expertly tapped into widespread suspicions that something was not right in Steubenville. The popular narrative that emerged pitted Steubenville against everyone else: Steubenville citizens felt besieged by meddling outsiders; everyone else felt the disturbing tweets and photos produced that night revealed something sinister about the town, which residents were trying to cover back up. The tension was captured best in a New York Times article that featured Steubenville’s head football coach growling at a reporter who had inquired about the case: "You're going to get yours. And if you don't get yours, somebody close to you will." Shadowy hackers threatening the town from cyberspace was an almost too-perfect escalation.

“We’re not really the judge nor the jury,” KYAnonymous, masked and with his voice disguised, told an Anderson Cooper 360 reporter, “But it’s fair to say we are the executioner. They incriminated themselves by posting that information online. They took part in criminal activities. If you think they’re guilty, that’s because it’s your conscience telling you they’re guilty.”

The video that launched Operation Roll Red Roll on December included a dramatic ultimatum: If all of the students who were complicit in the rape—bystanders and perpetrators alike—didn’t issue a public apology by January 1, Anonymous would release the “names, social security numbers, addresses, relatives, and phone numbers” of “every single member of the football team, those involved, the coaches, the principal, and more.” The information dump never happened, and Lostutter now claims he never intended to release the private information of minors. Instead, he said, it was a “scare tactic” to get students to come forward with more information. Information did come, but it was not mainly from the students. When the Operation Roll Red Roll video went viral, KnightSec was inundated with thousands of anonymous tips. At one point, 300 users filled an IRC chat room Lostutter had created to organize the operation.

"It was insane," said Cassandra Fairbanks, an anti-rape activist heavily involved in KnightSec at the time. "People were coming forward with all kinds of links. I was getting contacted by people who had other stories of corruption, who had their rapes thrown aside." Fairbanks lived in nearby Pittsburgh. She was the administrator of the Occupy Steubenville Facebook page, and was instrumental in organizing a 2,000-person protest that took place in Steubenville in late December. Armed with the tips, Lostutter began conducting a real-time, crowdsourced investigation. He tweeted out information he deemed credible from the KYAnonymous account. Eventually he gained 30,000 followers, and they acted as a powerful microphone.

When I interviewed KYAnonymous over Skype during the campaign, he explained how he vetted his information, which came mostly over Twitter:

"I consider the source. If I think it interferes with the original story and they have two followers [on Twitter]… then I don't pay attention unless I hear it from another person. If it can correlate somehow then I'll put it out there for the world to judge. Then the world judges and says ‘Yes this happens in our town, no it doesn't.’

If it were just Lostutter, his tweets might have gotten lost in the ether. But he worked in parallel with the website Local Leaks, a Wikileaks-style website that compiled many of these same tips into a big dossier called the Steubenville Files. Local Leaks is run by Christopher Doyon, also known as "Commander X," a longtime Anonymous hacktivist who made a dramatic escape to Canada from California in 2010 to avoid federal hacking charges. He's been on the lam ever since. Doyon is not a reliable source. Once, he boasted to me in an interview that he had access to "Every classified database in the U.S." Still, Doyon's site became a go-to information source for many interested in the Steubenville story, its claims repeated widely by respectable news blogs.

Presented with the Steubenville Files, journalists seized on the narrative that Anonymous was exposing the Steubenville rape case, just as they had exposed military contractors who had attacked Wikileaks in the past. Anonymous publicized disturbing facts: The victim said she had been drugged; one of the parties the victim had attended that night was held at an assistant football coach’s home. They posted the ugly tweets from witnesses, and the infamous photo of Mays and Richmond holding the victim like a sack between them.

But the most explosive facts Anonymous “uncovered” were false. Lostutter and Local Leaks painted a lurid fantasy where "Jane Doe's" rape was just one of many carried out by a self-identifying "rape crew" of football players, aided and abetted by coaches, law enforcement and Steubenville government officials. A child porn ring, an illegal gambling ring, and a drug ring were all allegedly tied to the rape. Steubenville was a Midwestern hellhole out of a Coen brothers movie.

To date, no proof of any of these allegations has surfaced. Many fell apart at the barest inspection. “It was badly written fiction,” said Lee Stranahan, a conservative journalist who has covered Steubenville obsessively on his blog. He believes the media ignored the facts of the case and built up a sensationalistic narrative that fit Anonymous' crusade. “That whole narrative where they were covered up or protected because they were football players, I didn’t see any evidence of that whatsoever. These guys were arrested, they were pulled out of bed the night before school started.”

Stranahan emerged as the harshest critic of KYAnonymous and his Steubenville campaign. He is not exactly neutral himself, writing for right-wing propaganda outlet Breitbart.com and appearing in Breitbart’s 2012 documentary "Occupy Unmasked," a hit job against Occupy that painted Anonymous as dangerous cyberterrorists. But he is also a competent reporter who self-funded multiple reporting trips to Steubenville and developed sources within the community. And it should be clear to anyone who reads the Steubenville Files today that it is total bullshit.

One of the central targets of the “Rape Crew” conspiracy theory was James “Jim” Parks, the webmaster of RollRedroll.com, a Steubenville High School sports fanpage not officially connected to the school. On December 23, 2012, RollRedRoll.com was hacked and defaced with Lostutter’s KYAnonymous video. Parks’ email account was hacked and his private emails leaked in a .zip file to the internet. This was what brought the FBI to Lostutter’s door in April.

Lostutter and other KnightSec supporters spun the contents of Jim Parks' emails into more proof of a Rape Crew fantasy. In a statement accompanying the hack, KnightSec declared that there was possible child porn in Parks' email, as well as a photo of Savanah Deitrich, another high-profile rape victim. (The woman in the photo was clearly not Deitrich.) From this, the statement concluded, Parks was "possibly hiring the team to go to different parties and send him pics of girls they take advantage of."

Parks decried the “terrorist group” who had attacked him. “The outrageous claims they made while controlling this site were totally false, completely absurd, and totally unfounded,” he said in a statement after the hack.

These days, Lostutter no longer stands by his claims of a sinister football player-child porn ring led by Jim Parks. During the raid, his FBI interrogator informed him that the women in Parks' email were over 18. The interrogator explained that by spreading Parks’ emails and the photos inside, Lostutter had actually created more victims.

“I never looked at it this way,” Lostutter said.

Discussing Parks was one of the few times Lostutter's conviction faltered. "I feel bad, if I could talk to the dude and say sorry, I'd tell him I'm sorry for putting his name out there and putting his business out there," he said. But that doesn't mean he wouldn't do it all over again.

“If I had to go to bat for a victim, I'd do it,” he told me. “Even if I was wrong I would do it. The good guy stands up for the victim.”

The facts were secondary to the mission of avenging Jane Doe for Lostutter. But it’s puzzling why so many others repeated Lostutter's outlandish claims so credulously during the height of the Steubenville story. It may be a testament the power of the mystique surrounding Anonymous, or the irresistible urge to play amateur detective when faced with dubious digital evidence, recently on embarassing display during the Boston bombing manhunt. Stranahan said he believes that Lostutter’s heart was in the right place, but he was caught up in something bigger than he could control.

“I don't think Anonymous should be getting any credit for doing anything good here,” he said. “They did nothing good. They clearly raised awareness, but they spread a false narrative and attacked a guy who had nothing to do with it.”

Despite the false accusations, others still believe that the light Lostutter helped shine on Steubenville was instrumental to the convictions of the two boys, and to the convening of a new grand jury investigation to see if any other crimes had been committed that night.

"If it wasn't for Anonymous," a Steubenville bar patron Yahoo in March, "this would've been swept under the rug." Lostutter and other KnightSec members repeatedly claimed that the victim herself had voiced support of Operation Roll Red Roll through friends on Twitter.

Waiting in the security line at Newark International Airport on my way down to Kentucky, I got a call from another one of Lostutter's biggest supporters, the comedian Roseanne Barr. Barr has emerged as an unlikely Anonymous booster, something that she told me stems from her early involvement in Occupy Wall Street. In an interview with KYAnonymous on her internet radio show she’d gushed that he had "restored my faith in males."

“I think he totally spoke with the intelligence and the voice of a survivor of abuse,” Barr told me. “He is like a lot of these guys that are just like, ‘Wait a minute, I got to be a man and stand up for this. I can't look at this anyway but this one way.’ I think he's brave. Going against power for the right thing, that's scary.”

Even as he spent more and more time on Steubenville, Lostutter struggled to keep friends and family in the dark about his alter ego. When his girlfriend would ask why he was spending so much time on the computer, he simply replied he was "working." At the car dealership where he worked at the time, he spent much of his time hunched over his computer, organizing the campaign. (It was probably not a coincidence that he only lasted a few months there once Operation Roll Red Roll took off.)

Sometimes his online activities would intrude on his real-life ones. In mid-December, fresh off the success of the Hunter Moore campaign, Lostutter launched an operation against the Westboro Church, which had announced it would be protesting the funerals of victims of the Newtown, Conn. school shooting. Someone hacked the Twitter account of Westboro matriach Shirley Phelps. Lostutter was at a strip club with his girlfriend when it happened, but that didn't keep him from gloating on Twitter.

"I tweeted, 'Shirley, I'm in the strip club and these boobs reminded of yours," Lostutter said with a laugh. "That shit got 300 retweets right off the bat."

Once, he was at the supermarket with his girlfriend when someone messaged him on Twitter with dire news: The person claimed an inside source had revealed the Department of Justice was hunting Lostutter: He’d seen “KYAnonymous” written on a whiteboard at an FBI office, somewhere in Ohio.

"I just turned bright white like a fucking ghost," Lostutter said. He had long suspected he’d be targeted—all prominent Anonymous members eventually were. But the realization that it was finally happening sent chills down his spine. His girlfriend asked him if he was OK. "I said yeah, I'm fine, I just ate something."

If the FBI raid had a silver lining, it was the lifting of this weight of secrecy and uncertainty from Lostutter's shoulders.

"The FBI, coming to raid you—they're threatening to put you in prison, but they're also freeing you," Lostutter told me. We were sitting at the Waterfront Restaurant and Lounge, Lostutter's favorite Winchester bar, on a sprawling deck overlooking the muddy banks of the Kentucky River.

Lostutter turned to a woman sitting next to us. "What did you think about that case in Steubenville where the football team raped that girl?" he asked. "And what did you think about that stuff where the hackers took down the team's website?"

The woman gasped. She had heard about the case, but not the hacking. She asked, "Who hacked the website?"

"Some good-looking kid who's sitting at The Waterfront with a reporter next to him writing a story about him," Lostutter said with a huge grin. Later, Lostutter relayed that he had overheard the woman walking around telling other patrons "there's some hacker here.”

Lostutter later asked me not to report the hacking comment. He is adamant that he did not actually hack or help plan the RollRedRoll.com hack. A hacker named BatCat later took responsibility in the Steubenville Herald-Star, saying he broke into the site in 15 minutes by guessing the password.

Lostutter said BatCat approached him one day during Op Roll Red Roll and offered to hack the site: "I formed an IRC channel, BatCat jumped in, said he could hack the site. I said OK, whatever. Everybody says they can hack." However, in our first phone call Lostutter had told me that he logged into the administrator panel of RollRedRoll.com using a password BatCat gave him, then changed the password. Lostutter said he admitted this to the FBI during the raid. This was almost certainly illegal.

Operation Roll Red Roll caused a furor among Steubenville residents, most of whom, it’s safe to say, had little idea what Anonymous was before it came to town. After the initial shock, some began their own public relations campaigns to counteract KYAnonymous’. At the end of January, I spoke with Nicole Lamantia, a longtime Steubenville resident and the wife of a Steubenville High School football coach, who had created a blog to combat the rumors.

One involved a relative of hers, who had been accused on Local Leaks of having orchestrated a complicated revenge plot to set Jane Doe up to be raped. The names and photos of the relative and her boyfriend were splashed prominently on the page. But the girl was out of town the night of the rape and had absolutely nothing to do with it, Lamantia said.

Lamantia said, "You have this 16-year-old girl who lives a normal teenage life, and all of a sudden her name and picture are up there. And granted Anonymous isn't dangerous. But you've got 2,000 people at a rally and you can't guarantee that there are no dangerous people in that rally. Her parents were petrified—what if some crazy person is trying to harm her because they believe what's on Local Leaks?"

When Lamantia launched her blog, she was quickly attacked by KnightSec supporters. She singled out KYAnonymous in particular for terrorizing the town. "We were all kind of bullied into silence by him," she said. "We were afraid that if we disagreed we would get hacked. He didn't try to back up his facts. He didn't take the time to reach out to any of us to hear the other side, and that's upsetting to me."

Anonymous' shadow over the trial may have had the opposite effect than Lostutter intended. The prosecutor in charge of the case, Marianne Hemmeter, said that Anonymous’ attacks had made her job harder. In a press conference after the trial, she said: “We had pretty good working relationships with some of the witnesses that you heard from, but once Anonymous hit, there was a chilling effect.”

But most of the downsides of KnightSec’s campaign have been overshadowed by the undisputedly spectacular leak in early January of a video of a Steubenville football player, Michael Nodianos, drunkenly joking about the rape. When Lostutter began Operation Roll Red Roll, he had been shown a screen shot of the video and told to keep an eye out for it. One day, a random Twitter account tweeted him to say they had an interesting video but didn't want to give it to the Steubenville authorities for fear it would be covered up.

"It clicked for me as soon as I seen that screenshot pass in the video," Lostutter said. "I was like, that's the fucking screenshot, I found the video. Yes!"

The video exploded. Nodianos' disgusting jokes cycled over and over on cable news: “She is so raped right now.... They raped her harder than that cop raped Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction." Although Nodianos was not present during any crime and, his attorney claims, didn’t even know the victim, the video did more than anything else to make Steubenville a household name.

The video wasn’t forensic evidence of a crime, but of the attitude that could allow something like the rape to happen over and over again. When people talk about how Anonymous “exposed” Steubenville, they can’t mean the facts of this case, which were utterly botched by KnightSec and its allies. What they mean is that Anonymous exposed how sexual assault is a bigger issue than bad people doing bad things. That it is enabled and even celebrated by a culture that tells young men it’s OK to laugh off a horrific rape as harmless late-night debauchery, to be instagrammed and tweeted about, then expects the rest of us to feel bad for the perpetrators when they're punished. That’s the valuable lesson of this video, and KYAnonymous alone had uncovered it.

As the Steubenville story got bigger, Operation Roll Red Roll went out of control. The Nodianos video had raised the expectations on KYAnonymous and attracted another flood of frenzied supporters. And when the January 1 deadline Lostutter set in his original video passed with neither apologies from the football players nor the promised information bomb, people began to take things into their own hands. There were death threats to football players. The sheriff said people in Guy Fawkes masks were going door-to-door terrorizing residents.

Lostutter tried to rein things in, encouraging followers to distance themselves from the more violent tactics. But the anarchic structure of Anonymous that had helped him attract mass support was now working against him.

“Half of Anonymous is like 16-year-old kids so they can do whatever the hell they want and you can't tell them nothing," Lostutter said. "It sucked as far as that went because it made me look bad."

Lostutter was simultaneously becoming distracted by an increasingly vociferous gang of critics and haters. A hacker named IcanHazCandy and a rival group called Team Intricate worked day and night to discredit his findings, out his identity, and confuse his allies by sowing misinformation.

By the end of January, Lostutter decided decided he'd had enough. He was sick of the trolls, and of constantly looking over his shoulder. He wanted to spend more time with his girlfriend. Lostutter announced on Twitter that he was going dark.

“Basically I just wanted to really wanted to focus on life for a while,” he said. This would not be as easy shutting down a Twitter account. Minutes after he announced his retirement, a newly-created Twitter account tweeted at him: "Why would you do that, Deric Lostutter of Winchester, KY? And what are you going to do without your twitter followers?!"

Lostutter doesn't know how his identity leaked—he suspects an angry ex-girlfriend or a local Winchester rival who learned his identity back when all his tweets still all said “Winchester” on them. Terrified, he gathered his Anonymous mask, flag, and newspaper clippings about his work as KYAnonymous and burned them outside his girlfriend’s house.

“That’s what I see on TV, they burn everything,” he said. “They're getting raided, they investigate for murder or shit like that, they've got a barrel out back and all their clothes are in that motherfucker.”

Now Lee Stranahan and his other opponents picked up their attacks, armed with information about his real life. They suggested he was making money off of Steubenville. Lee Stranahan noticed Lostutter had been “bragging about his new truck” on Facebook. "Note To Deric Lostutter aka KYAnonymous: Anonymous Is Not Your Personal ATM," Stranhan wrote in a blog post.

Lostutter denies he was ever paid for his activism, or that he engaged in any hacking-related financial crime. He recently bought a motorcycle and a truck, but he pointed out both were used, not new.

But Lostutter's activism did coincide unusually with a new career. In January, while he was still active as KYAnonymous, Lostutter became a contractor at BullyVille, an anti-bullying website. BullyVille had been a strong supporter of KnightSec and KYAnonymous from its earliest days.

When KnightSec hacked Hunter Moore in December, James McGibney, BullyVille’s outspoken owner, was among the loudest cheering. He has a longstanding feud with Moore and recently won a $250,000 defamation lawsuit against him after Moore accused him of being a pedophile and threatened to rape his wife. McGibney regularly shouted out to KYAnonymous on Twitter and a copy of KYAnonymous’ anti-Hunter Moore video was even posted on BullyVille.

When Lostutter was unmasked as KYAnonymous, critics accused McGibney of paying him to attack his rival under the cover of KnightSec. McGibney denies this. He said that he did not know Lostutter was KYAnonymous until after Lostutter started contracting for him. Losttutter approached him with information about some vulnerabilities on his site and McGibney hired him, knowing nothing of his double-life, according to McGibney. “He's doing a lot of good work for us,” McGibney told me.

That work is interesting considering Lostutter’s past. In addition to some computer security work, Lostutter is paid by BullyVille to find the personal information of James McGibney’s enemies on the internet. One of McGibney’s favorite sayings is “sometimes you need to be a bully to beat a bully.” Bullyville sends him Twitter handles of people to track down for naming and shaming for various nebulous offenses.

“I can take it off your Facebook,” Lostutter said. “If you checked in somewhere on a map and checked in at home, it's on Facebook maps. I got your cross street, I know where you live.” Lostutter’s own anonymity was once the most important thing in his life—now his job is destroying others’.

KYAnonymous has been unmasked, but in the wake of the FBI raid, Lostutter is still weaponizing the media. He has yet to arrested or even informed that he's the target of an investigation into the hacking of Rollredroll.com, but his lawyer said in a statement he believes he'll be charged with three felonies under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (In an email to Gawker, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Cincinnati office wrote, "we are unable to confirm or deny the existence of any potential investigation into this matter.") He wants to put pressure on the Department of Justice before that happens, and raise money for his defense.

"I believe they're trying to make a spectacle of me,” he told me. “They're using me to say that this is what happens when you challenge us. I got in trouble for questioning the government.”

He’s been remarkably successful: Since Gawker revealed his identity a little over a week ago, Lostutter has become a cause celebre online, after outrage went viral over the fact he could face a longer prison sentence than the Steubenville rapists if charged (a technically true, if effectively meaningless comparison). He raised over $30,000 for a defense fund in just a matter of days. (The fund is administered by Lostutter's attorney Jason Flores-Williams, a founder of the Whistleblower Defense League, which specializes in defending hacktivists and leakers.)

"I was shocked, I was stunned, I think I drank a whole fifth of tequila in celebration," he said. Now he’s selling "Free KYAnonymous" stickers on his new website, ProjectKnightSec.com.

When we were at The Waterfront bar, Lostutter grew reflective after downing a couple bourbons on the rocks from red plastic cups.

“I always knew some weird shit was going to happen in my life,” he said. “You work these jobs, you work at Old Chicago, you work at Best Buy, you just feel like you're meant to do so much more.” He remembers watching the livestream on the day of the big protest in Steubenville that he helped organize and inspire. Hundreds of miles away, 2,000 people had braved bone-chilling December temperatures to stand up for Jane Doe and speak out about rape.

“I thought, this is what I'm supposed to do.”

After we finished up at The Waterfront, Lostutter took me to meet Juan Greene, the owner of Night Shade Records and Lostutter’s longtime rap producer. Lostutter started rapping in middle school and has put out a couple albums on Night Shade Records under the name Shadow.

But first we had to help Greene jump-start his Chevy Avalanche, which had stalled in a WalMart parking lot. When we arrived, Greene was sitting in the decked-out vehicle with his wife. Greene is a big, 36-year-old black guy, and as he hunched over the engine next to the scrawny white Lostutter they looked like partners in a buddy cop film.

After a few minutes of failed jump attempts, a towering Dodge pickup pulled up next to the two Chevys. A man with an huge beard and a lush, braided rattail hopped out. His grey T-shirt said SECOND AMENDMENT and was tucked into his jeans to accommodate the handgun on his waist. He noted the puniness of the jumper cables Lostutter and Greene had been using and produced a set of cables the size of a child’s forearm from his own truck.

“Never skimp on jumper cables,” he advised. As the battery charged, the three discussed the merits of each others’ trucks. (It was decided the Dodge was superior.) Lostutter admired the man’s handgun. “Did you see that fucking rattail,” Lostutter said once we were back in the truck, on the way to the studio. “Welcome to Kentucky!”

The studio was a tiny, stuffy room tucked into the top floor of Greene’s house. A soundboard dominated the entire left wall and a couple of CDs tacked above the door, including Lostutter’s album “Nighshade,” were the only decoration. We sat as Greene delivered a lengthy monologue on the importance of Lostutter to Night Shade Records, especially in regards to keeping relevant in the social media era. “Dude has been stupid instrumental to keeping the brand alive,” he said. “Any Facebooks, any Soundclouds, that’s all him.”

Lostutter has developed a small following in Winchester, with upbeat rhymes that glorify Kentucky country life. In "Boondocks," he raps about getting wasted on Bourbon to a sample of the country group Little Big Town’s song of the same name. Green said, “I like that he does some personal music. He keeps it with what's going on. He can 'neck it out a little, with boots and everything. Dude's a people person—his music is about himself.”

Lostutter came to the studio the night he was raided to blow off some steam. He was ready to rap about his life online. “I went to the studio and I freestyled,” he said. "'The feds checked in to see what my trap about,'" he recited, so quickly I could barely write it down. "'I got held up with guns you boys only rap about.'"

There are some hints in the blog that Mills shared Snowden's passion for civil liberties issues. In one of the most intriguing updates, in October last year, Mills posted a picture of woman – presumably her – wearing the V for Vendetta mask, symbolic of the Anonymous movement. It contains the caption: "All they want is our souls."

Lindsay Mills, the 28-year-old pole-dancing acrobat Edward Snowden left to become an internationally-renowned leaker, posted many self-portraits on her (now-shutdown) blog. One is her wearing the hacktivist collective Anonymous' trademark (well, technically, Time Warner's trademark) Guy Fawkes mask.

Obviously this doesn't say anything definitive about any Anonymous connections—the Guy Fawkes mask has become sort of a generalized symbol of counterculture—but it is an interesting coincidence considering that Snowden worked for Booz Allen, which was spectacularly hacked by Anonymous in in 2011. Not to mention the fact that the kind of blockbuster material Snowden got his hands on is something most Anonymous hacktivists could only dream of exposing.

The furor surrounding the Steubenville, Ohio rape case was sparked in large part by the raucous entrance of the hacktivist collective Anonymous into the story. Anonymous members organized digital and real-life protests and leaked information about the case, occasionally going beyond the law in their efforts to raise awareness and avenge the victim.

Gawker has learned the leader of that campaign was raided by the FBI in April in connection to a hacking and identity theft investigation sparked by Anonymous' Steubenville campaign. Now, he is revealing his identity, in anticipation of being targeted in the investigation.

He is Deric Lostutter, a 26-year-old who lives in Winchester, Kentucky. On April 15, the FBI executed a search warrant on Lostutter's home, taking computers, storage media, and his Xbox.

Lostutter confirmed to Gawker that he was KYAnonymous, the leader of KnightSec, the Anonymous offshoot that carried out "Operation Roll Red Roll," which targeted Steubenville over the rape by two football players of a 16-year-old girl. In a few weeks in late 2012 he became a well-known figure in the Steubenville storyline, at one point giving an interview to CNN in a Guy Fawkes mask. (The two football players were found guilty of rape in March.)

According to the warrant obtained by Gawker, FBI agents were looking for evidence related to the hacking of Rollredroll.com—the website of a Steubenville High School booster club that was defaced during the height of the Steubenville campaign—and the unauthorized access of the webmaster's email address. Rollredroll.com webmaster James Park's email account was broken into, and many of his private emails dumped online. In February, a hacker named Batcat took responsibility for the hack in an article in the Steubenville Herald-Star. He claimed he hacked Rollredroll.com in 15 minutes by guessing Jim Parks' password security question, after being approached by KYAnonymous.

In a statement posted on his website, Lostutter described the raid: "As I open the door to great the driver approximately 12 F.B.I. Swat Team agents jumped out of the truck screaming for me to 'Get The Fuck Down' with m-16 assault rifles and full riot gear armed."

He writes:

This is my call to you, in the media, in the world of anonymous, who look to change the world to a free, transparent one, to my friends and family as well, to come to my aid, if you can find it in your heart, share my story, donate, buy a sticker, rally in the streets to demand the investigation against me be dismissed.

Lostutter is being represented by Jason Flores-Williams of the Whistleblower's Defense League, a coalition of lawyers who specializes in defending hacktivists and freedom of information campaigners. The Whistleblower's Defense League has set up a fund to raise money for Lostutter's defense.

Flores-Williams told Gawker the raid was connected to a grand jury investigation in Ohio, though Lostutter has not yet been informed that he is a target of the investigation.

"We certainly hope the United States comes to its senses and decides not to indict, and if they do we will aggressively litigate the incident," said Flores-Williams. "What's unique here to me is that it's not a national security issue. This isn't at the forefront at the NSA or the CIA. This comes out of the heartland of the country, and this is a person who is just trying to do what is right for the heartland."

A spokesman for the FBI's Cincinnati office, Todd Lindgren, said in an email, "we are unable to confirm or deny the existence of any potential investigation into this matter."

Lostutter is preparing for an onslaught:

So local news stations are picking up the story now, today is going to implode the internet.

— Shadow (@shadowrapz) June 6, 2013

Here's the whole search warrant:

When 24-year-old software developer Rob Rhinehart stopped by Gawker's office last Wednesday afternoon he hadn't had a bite of solid food in four days, but was brimming with energy. Some of his pep was probably due to the fact that the previous day he launched a hugely successful crowd-funding campaign for Soylent, the liquid food replacement he invented and largely subsists on. It had received over $200,000 in a matter of hours. But the rest, he'd say, was science.

Rhinehart rattled off the benefits he's noticed since switching almost exclusively to a diet of Soylent: improved concentration and strength, weight loss. "By every objective measure, I'm an incredibly healthy person," he said. "It's been a huge change, not just in terms of sleep and gym performance but cognition. I can say I feel much more alert, and more patient, and optimistic."

Rhinehart had brought along liter Soylent for a Gawker taste test. Soylent is a slurry of vitamins, minerals, protein, and carbohydrates that Rhinehart concocted in his kitchen and now believes is the of future food. In a February blog post announcing the Soylent "experiment," called "How I Stopped Eating Food," Rhinehart explained:

I researched every substance the body needs to survive, plus a few extras shown to be beneficial, and purchased all of them in nearly raw chemical form from a variety of sources… The first morning my kitchen looked more like a chemistry lab than a cookery, but I eventually ended up with an thick, odorless, beige liquid. I call it 'Soylent'.

Since then, Rhinehart says he's fine-tuned the formula using himself and a half-dozen volunteers as human guinea pigs. Dozens, if not hundreds, more, have followed or modified Rhinehart open source recipe and shared their experiences on Soylent's active forums.

Soylent inventor Rob Rhinehart.

Rhinehart took a one-liter Nalgene bottle full of Soylent out of his messenger bag. Each liter of Soylent contains approximately 1,000 calories, according to Rhinehart. He drinks two and a half liters per day. Contributors to the crowdfunding campaign can purchase a month's supply of Soylent for $230, or about $7.60 a day, but ultimately Rhinehart hopes an all-Soylent diet will only cost $5/day.

I was pretty full from the half pound of lasagna I'd just eaten hours earlier for lunch, but I poured myself a tall glass. Soylent looks as appetizing as it sounds. The combination of its off-white color, opacity and viscosity made it look—sorry to be gross here—like watered-down semen. Tiny specs of something brown and no doubt highly nutritious floated in the liquid. Taking a sip, it was actually not distasteful, as long as I blocked out all thoughts of bodily fluid. (This was hard to do; perhaps Soylent could improve my ability to concentrate on things other than semen while drinking Soylent.) Soylent tastes like the homemade nontoxic Play-Doh you made, and sometimes ate, as a kid. Slightly sweet and earthy with a strong yeasty aftertaste.

Gawker staff tried Soylent. Feedback was mixed. Including:

• "[It] made me feel like joining a cult, after just one sip."
• "It tasted like when you're baking and you taste the ingredients even if there's not sugar or vanilla in there, you just have a compulsion to taste wet food."
• "My mouth tastes hot and like old cheese."
• "It tasted like someone wrung out a dishtowel into a glass."
• "It was great and I love it. I don't want to eat anymore."

We may have focused too much on the taste, which Rhinehart says is beside the point. "I'm not trying to make something delicious; there are already a lot of delicious things," he said. "It's all about efficiency, it's about cost and convenience." Rhinehart said he used to spend many hours a day buying and preparing food that was nowhere as near nutritious as the Soylent he makes in a minute by adding the powdered nutrients to water. Now, "I don't have to cook, I don't have to clean dishes."

There are of course plenty of other health shakes, nutrition supplemnts, juice cleanses, energy drinks etc. But what makes Soylent unique, is that it is the first of these "functional beverage" developed for and by young, male tech geeks. The new company founded to bring Soylent to market is based in Silicon Valley, and most of its founders met while launching a wireless communications start-up as part of the famed tech company incubator Y Combinator. Now, they're making Soylent.

"Paul Graham called it the 'pivot of the century,'" Rhinehart said, referring to the Y Combinator founder and venture capitalist. Soylent has been a much-discussed topic on Hacker News, the preeminent digital water cooler of the tech industry.

These are people who believe every moment they don't spend coding a world-changing app might be a loss for humanity. So feeding yourself is a time-wasting problem that can be solved with technology. Soylent is part of the geek "biohacking" movement, which seeks to improve body function through obsessive self-tracking and chemical substances. Some critics have said Soylent is just an extreme weight-loss diet in disguise, but I believe Rheinhart when he says his only goal is cold, hard efficiency: the maximum nutrition with the minimum effort. When Rhinehart finished his third month of Soylent in April, he noticed his farts stopped smelling. More disconcertingly, his joints began to ache. He self-diagnosed a sulphur deficiency. "Ten grams of sulfur from Methylsulfonylmethane cured me right away," he wrote. Rhinehart had debugged himself.

Soylent has become a big internet story, thanks to Rhinehart's savvy marketing campaign and crowdfunding windfall. There are a surprising amount of people on the internet who want to live on thick odorless beige liquid, and Rhinehart—intense, nerdy, blithely optimistic—is the perfect guy to speak to them. Currently, Soylent's crowdfunding campaign has raised over $340,000 and it still has 23 days left. Still, Soylent is controversial. A number of nutritionists have come out agains the idea that anyone can live on goop alone. (Rhinehart counters that he doesn't intend Soylent to replace all food in one's diet—just most.) Others have pointed out that liquid food replacement already exists in a much less sexy, medical form: It's the same stuff being forced down the throats of the Guantanamo Bay hunger-strikers.

Rhinehart brushes off the haters as luddites: "Food is a haven for reactionaries," he wrote. "In the past food was about survival. Now we can try to create something ideal."

After Rhinehart left, I still had half a pint of Soylent in my glass. Rhinehart says Soylent is best chilled, but mine was lukewarm and a brown sediment had settled at the bottom of the glass. I was having trouble getting it down. I tried imagining subsisting on Soylent. A jug of Soylent omnipresent at my side, silently replenishing myself during meetings or a movie. It seemed gothically futuristic: The tragic fate of someone with a rare chronic disease caused by radiation expsourein the post-apocalypse.

But then, couldn't hunger be seen as a sort of chronic condition? And food the medicine you treat it with? Imagine if the only way to treat some disease was to buy many different ingredients from a store, then cook the ingredients into medicine according to a complicated recipe, then clean up all the equipment after. Wouldn't you want a simpler medicine, something you could just chug? I was beginning to see the logic that led to Soylent. Then I took another big gulp of the stuff and my feeble, lasagna-fired mind faltered and I thought of bodily fluids and began to gag, so I dumped the whole thing in the sink.

How much would you pay for an interview with Julian Assange, Wikileaks' founder and current undisputed world record-holder for Most Consecutive Days Spent In London's Ecuadorian Embassy? $58 seems fair. But Assange asked filmmaker Alex Gibney for $1 million to be interviewed for his new Wikileaks documentary We Steal Secrets, according to Gibney.

Gibney detailed the ordeal of trying to get Assange on camera in an interview with The Nation

Jon Wiener: Any film about Wikileaks has to make interviewing Julian Assange task number one. You worked hard on that, and finally you met with him to discuss an interview. How did that go?

Alex Gibney: Not so well. I tried over the course of a year and a half to get the interview. He’d already been interviewed by practically everyone on the planet. Finally we had a six hour meeting. He told me that the market rate for an interview was a million dollars. I told him I don’t pay for interviews. He said “That’s too bad, in that case you might do something else for me.” He wanted me to spy on our other interview subjects—which I found a rather odd request from someone concerned about source protection. So I never did get the interview with Julian Assange.

This absurd request can probably be explained by the fact that Wikileaks desperately needs the cash. Donations to Wikileaks have slowed to a trickle, thanks in part to a blockade by U.S.. financial institutions against the organization and also the fact the organization has basically been reduced to a popular Twitter account as Julian Assange languishes in Ecuador's London Embassy in an attempt to avoid rape charges in Sweden.

Since no interviews with Julian Assange look forthcoming until he lowers his price to around $58, you may as well revisit Gawker's interview with Assange in November, for which we paid $0.

Update: Wikileaks' official twitter account points to Wikileaks' extensive annotation of the We Steal Secrets transcript, in which Wikileaks denies that Assange asked Gibney for $1 million for an interview. From the annotation:

Julian Assange did not say the market rate for an interview with him was $1 million dollars and Alex Gibney did not decline. This section deliberately distorts the final, lengthy negotiation between Julian Assange and Alex Gibney regarding his and WikiLeaks' possible participation in the documentary, which at the time was unnamed.

In February, rap magazine The Source reported that 46-year-old Bronx rapper Tim Dog had died from "a seizure following a long bout with diabetes." But now a warrant for his arrest has been issued, following increasing evidence that Tim "Tim Dog" Blair faked his own death to escape thousands of dollars in debt.

Before maybe faking his own death, Balir was best known for his 1991 song "Fuck Compton," dissing the West Coast hip-hop scene. But since then he's been undertaking a series of cons, where he meets women on dating sites and swindles them out of money. So many that, according to VICE's Drew Millard, there is an "international network/support system of women who have had their lives ruined because they met Tim Dog on the internet."

According to VICE, Blair scammed one Dutch woman into investing in a fake European tour of black male strippers called the Chocolate Fantasy Tour. He convinced a Mississippi woman to invest $32,000 in a box CD set, which never came out. In 2011 was ordered by a judge to pay her $20,000, and that, says the woman, is why he faked his own death in February. A death certificate has yet to be produced, even though Tim Dog's family apparently held a funeral for Blair. The Mississippi prosecutor handling the case told the AP he wasn't able to find any proof of Blair's death, thus prompting the warrant.

You can tell it's summer, because we're getting into fake death season. First Andy Kaufman was spotted in New Mexico, now Tim Dog.

Bad news, Portland: You will not be benefiting from the sweet (well, tasteless) tooth-protecting power of fluoridated water in the near future. For the fourth time since 1956, Portland overwhelmingly voted down a measure to fluoridate its water like every other major city in America, because many Portlanders will throw a tantrum over anything that presents even a remote chance it will affect their idyllic lives.

The key point pushed by the anti-fluoride campaign, which was driven, as is practically everything in Portland, largely by liberals, was that the government wanted to force toxic chemicals into your body. At last night's victory party for the anti-fluoride campaign Clean Water Portland, they filled themselves with harmful chemicals—by their own choice .

From Willamette Week:

At the bar, a quartet of campaign supporters clink Champagne glasses with beer pints.

"Here's to unfluoridated beer!" says a man in a blue beret. "I was going to have to switch to drinking nothing but Ninkasi." [A very delicious Oregon beer -ed.]

At 9:15 pm, the party is getting merrier. The smell of marijuana is so thick in the sports bar that Mercury news editor Denis Theriault says he thought an actual skunk had arrived.

Hopefully the anti-fluoride folks have mellowed out after their victory, and all that pot. My post on Monday lamenting the fluoride controversy elicited a howling response from the anti-fluoridation side, upset with the admittedly broad brush with which I painted their camp. The media director of the Fluoride Action Network sent me a Livescience.com article about the science behind the anti-Fluoride movement. "Here's what science writing is supposed to look like on the topic of fluoridation," she said. "You are so way off base on this issue." I read it, and learned it was true that some scientists and experts think Fluoride is a cause for concern.

But it also true that the overwhelming majority of studies and experts agree fluoridated water is harmless and helpful. From Scientific American's Kyle Hill

Simply put, the refusal of water fluoridation doesn’t have any scientific support. A review on fluoride’s effect on IQ out of Harvard was waved about as the main scientific opposition, but has since been thoroughly refuted. Decades of studies in different cities in different states, involving millions of people, have concluded that there is a safe level of fluoride—one part-per-million—that can be added to water for enormous benefit to our teeth and oral health with little to no adverse effects.

[Cue one million ani-Fluoride campaigners in the comments linking to that Harvard study.]

Nobody can say with 100% certainty that there are no risks to fluoride. There are risks to everything. The point of public health institutions like the CDC, the American Medical Association, and the American Dental Association is to use their giant budgets to weigh the risks and benefits of things like fluoride and act accordingly. All three are strongly in favor of fluoride. While the risks of fluoride presented by a handful of studies is uncertain, there is overwhelming evidence of its benefits—especially to the poor. (One study estimated communities that fluoridate their water save an average of up to $18.62 per per person per year.) Of course, to believe this you need to trust the scientists at the CDC more than the crusaders of the Fluoride Action Network. Many Portlanders obviously don't.

And that's the bigger concern than Portlanders' teeth rotting out. The logic that defeated fluoridation lies on the slippery slope down which one slides into the foul pit of anti-vaccination activism. This reasoning is fed above all by conspiratorial anti-government thinking. The Fluoridation Action Network argues that the CDC is enforcing a conspiracy of silence to maintain its own credibility. So did disgraced autism researcher Andrew Wakefield accuse British authorities of engaging in a conspiracy to "shield the government from exposure on the vaccine scandal" when he was banned from practicing medicine in the UK over his infamous bogus autism study.

No amount of studies will convince those campaigning against fluoride or vaccines, because the fluoride debate rests more on a clash of worldviews than studies: Anti-fluoride and anti-vaccination campaigners would undermine our public health system, which requires some trade-offs in personal autonomy for the greater good, in exchange for a libertarian wonderland in which every person gets exactly the healthcare they want, exactly when they want to have it. Only then will bureaucrats not have control over our bodies. Fluoride opponents in Portland frequently suggested the city's healthcare system should just be "fixed" so that everyone gets perfect and equal dental care, rendering fluoride unnecessary.

This would be great, but it's a world that will never exist. That large numbers of Portlanders apparently believe a widely-accepted public health measure to fill in the gaps of our imperfect healthcare system is a horrific affront to personal liberty says a lot about the city's disconnect from the real world, which I can say from experience is not just a Portlandia cliche. It is also an inherently reactionary position, and a close cousin to the dumb shrieks of death panels that marred the Obamacare debate. There many great things about Portland, Oregon, but the fluoride rejection shows its worst: the tendency among progressive of that city (and many others!) to reframe the decades-old politics of selfishness as some hyper-enlightened liberalism. So they rationalize getting exactly what they want, all of the time.

[Image by Jim Cooke.]

I'm not a fan of the proliferation of reaction gifs on the internet. Gifs are crutches for people who can't express themselves with words. Also, Gifs frequently cause long, boring debates over the correct pronunciation of "Gif."

But this. This is a gif. Here is why this is the best gif.

• It's made up of words, so it says what it means. No stupid Twilight characters or whatever.
  
• It represents an appropriate reaction to 99% of things one sees on the internet. It is literally the gif to end all gifs.
• It was made by this Tumblr user, who is awesome and also makes dozens of other weird animated text gifs, seemingly on demand. For example: "Shut up I'm blogging" and "I'm a walking sunglasses emoji"

So try responding to someone with the "lol nothing matters" gif the next time you are in an internet fight. You will automatically win so hard your opponent will probably disable all of their social media accounts and move to a remote mountaintop. Eventually the internet may disappear completely, thanks to the power of this one compelling gif, driving more and more people to remote mountaintops, where we'll all live in rural harmony.

Here is the full-sized version.

[via Animated Text]