
Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie - philk
http://www.resistradio.com/news/questioning-the-trollocaust-did-leotraynor-really-suffer-vile-hate-campaign
======
mquander
"Almost certainly" seems like a stretch.

\- The arguments regarding Traynor's behavior on Twitter carry absolutely no
water with me and sound like totally average behavior. It's not very intuitive
that only people you follow can message you.

\- Police in America frequently decline to investigate things like harassment
and petty theft in favor of spending their time elsewhere. I don't know about
Ireland, but it seems very unsurprising (if disappointing) that they would
ignore his complaint.

The only compelling reason to disbelieve anything is the whole home address
discovery thing, which does seem very strange. Although it's possible that
there was some convenient coincidence that permitted the identification,
probably that part of the story was embellished or false somehow. (edit: After
looking at replies, I changed my mind, I think it's more likely mostly true.
There's a lot of plausible avenues of discovery given the length of the
alleged abuse.)

The rest, however, seems very conventional and I don't see a good reason to
disbelieve it.

~~~
btilly
_It's not very intuitive that only people you follow can message you._

But after you've received some hate messages, it also sounds like the kind of
thing that you'd learn pretty quickly.

In other words if you're making up a story, it is the kind of detail that
you'd not noticed you'd gotten wrong. But if you're actually harassed, it is
the kind of thing that wouldn't keep happening to you for years.

Seems like a good reason to conclude that the story is made up.

As for home address discovery, that bothered me far less. If I had tracked
someone down to 3 IPs, one of which was close, I'd go looking for evidence
that there was a personal connection. One of the standard things that I would
think of is to look through all received emails, and look for the IP address
there.

That would indeed track it down reasonably reliably to a specific household
without any need for a court order. And if the person that I did this for
didn't understand what I did, confused explanations about how it was done are
only to be expected.

~~~
woodchuck64
> But after you've received some hate messages, it also sounds like the kind
> of thing that you'd learn pretty quickly.

He can't know in advance if he has a troll following him, and he likes to
reciprocate followers. Should he, in a sense, penalize followers because of a
troll?

I don't see anything in the original story about the delay between July 2009
and making his twitter account private. Is there anything to think it was
years rather than weeks?

~~~
ryguytilidie
This makes no sense at all to me. If you're getting 2-3 people a day following
you, and then sending you hateful DMs when you follow back, you seriously keep
refollowing random people who will presumably be harassing you? It's not
punishing anyone to put a bit of an effort in to seeing if the person seems
legit before following them back.

~~~
woodchuck64
If you have 20 new people a day following you and 2-3 are trolls, I'd still do
it. No troll is going to make me change my polite behavior with other people.

------
bithive123
The author of this article is almost certainly trolling.

It's perfectly logical that the victim would change his Twitter behavior even
after discovering the identity of the harasser. If your car were stolen but
then recovered and the thief arrested, would you stop locking it? After all,
the threat has been eliminated...

Just because you cannot traceroute an IP to a physical address doesn't mean
you can't determine where an IP is being used with a high degree of
confidence. If the parents were indeed friends of the victim, any email
correspondence sent from their home connection would include their IP in the
headers.

The biggest flaw however is that there is no plausible motive given for the
victim to lie. Sure, it's possible that he lied, but why would he?

~~~
Evbn
0\. He didn't change his behavior during the abuse, when he could have
trivially stopped it by unfollowing. If your car was stolen, would you keep
the loaner unlocked before your car was even recovered?

1\. Only if they use non webmail

2\. To sell a story. The default assumption should always be that tales like
this are false or at least extremely embellished.

~~~
samspot
Wait... am I supposed to assume all blog posts are false? Certainly an
interesting way to live. I'll start with your comment.

~~~
bduerst
If there is one coincidence to make you question the authenticity of the
author - nah.

If there are several coincidences, then this leads to a pattern of behavior to
which a motive can be questioned.

------
Bill_Dimm
This article is copied in its entirety from:

[http://www.resistradio.com/news/questioning-the-
trollocaust-...](http://www.resistradio.com/news/questioning-the-trollocaust-
did-leotraynor-really-suffer-vile-hate-campaign)

as admitted in the intro. Why link to a copy instead of the original?

~~~
philk
Because I'm functioning on little sleep and managed to miss that.

If one of the mods could change the URL to point to the original I'd be
grateful.

~~~
sillysaurus
Why did you post this analysis?

No, really, I'm curious. What drove you to do this?

Who _cares_ whether he's lying? (And _why_ do you care?)

~~~
nicholas_tuzzio
I care if he's lying because his story was re-printed in The Guardian, where I
read it, as truth. If it's not a true story, it's wrong to present it as such.

~~~
sillysaurus
_If it's not a true story, it's wrong to present it as such._

But _why_? Can you (or someone) please articulate what exactly is so bad about
it?

Some of the best and most influential stories in human history were precisely
that: lies presented as truth. Were the authors "bad" for doing this? At what
point does it become bad? (And why?)

~~~
nicholas_tuzzio
Hey look buddy, I'm an engineer; that means I solve problems. Not problems
like 'Why is lying wrong?', because that would fall within the purview of your
conundrums of philosophy. I solve practical problems.

------
bduerst
The only strong case here is in the IP address geo-identification.

Traynor could identify them if he were to cross validate the IP address
location with a list of known friends and family - people of whom would have
Traynor's personal address.

But Traynor should have suspected his friend - not his friend's teenage son.
That's the part of the story that doesn't add up.

~~~
zdw
Depends on what the "IT Genius" tried.

For example, IP addresses (even internal unroutable ones) are frequently
passed along in email headers. If he was able to find an IP and an email sent
by his friend in the same timeframe, that would be a good correlation. I've
done this on occasion when someone's external IP has dynamically changed but
they sent email, in order to fix VPN connections.

Pinning it on the son is the stretch here.

~~~
bduerst
Even with the IP address from the header, which geolocation service did he use
to pinpoint the street address?

If it's like most ISPs, this IP address is subject to change every couple of
days, so this IP location service would need to be updated with personal
addresses, across the globe, that often.

~~~
jerrya
I have a "dynamic" IP address from Cox, it has changed three times in six
years.

~~~
bduerst
Anecdotal, but did you request the static IP? I can't imagine Cox handing
those out like Pez.

~~~
jerrya
I think that's the point.

Cox (and my understanding many other ISPs as well) CHARGE for static IPs, but
give out dynamic IPs that basically never change because it is actually just
easier for them to set the service up that way.

The few times the IP address changed was when they did an upgrade at their
site, a very long outage, and I think a time when an installer screwed up a
neighbors installation.

I cannot guarantee my address tonight will be what it is now, but the reality
is, it will be.

I believe (stress no real evidence of this) that my home router tries to give
out the same IP addresses to the same MAC addresses. I say this because after
I reboot the router, my various machines will pop up at the same IP addresses
they had before (and none of them are Apple products known to do this on
purpose.)

------
jerrya
Just to add a bit more fuel to the fire, while a reasonable skepticism should
always be well, reasonable, I think it takes a lot of chutzpah to so directly
out and out call this fake given the sparsity of the argument as it is.

Compare this to skepticism over ElevatorGate.

FWIW, here's a woman at skepchick expressing doubt that Leo even exists:
[http://skepchick.org/2012/10/leo-traynor-anti-semitism-
and-t...](http://skepchick.org/2012/10/leo-traynor-anti-semitism-and-the-
sticky-problem-of-facts/)

~~~
Torgo
Someone should send her a link to Derailing for Dummies. Questioning his
account of the events is dangerously close to blaming the victim, derailing
the argument from the cause discussing anti-Semitism, and forms a pattern of
discouragement against people who come forward as the victims of trolling.
This is NOT ok.

~~~
othermaciej
And that is why the concept of "derailing" is BS. The position of the speaker
as member of an oppressed class means that you must accept their claims on
faith. To question them in any way is "NOT ok". Adopting this policy means
that no rational person should believe anything that comes from a group with
such ground rules.

~~~
wonderzombie
You've missed the point entirely.

If I told you I had a sandwich the other day, your skepticism meter wouldn't
suddenly kick in. You wouldn't ask me how much I paid or intimate that I don't
know what a sandwich is. If I told you a crazy guy yelled at me on the bus in
the city, you wouldn't ask me whether maybe I misunderstood, or start going
through my social network postings to confirm/deny that I took the bus to work
the other day.

Yet suddenly you're skeptical when someone claims to have experienced
discrimination or bigotry, you're full speed ahead on skepticism? Take nothing
as given? Come on.

This might not apply to _you personally_ , but that dynamic is why the term
was invented. Esp. with white male nerds, they find their skepticism often, it
seems, when minorities, et al, talk about experiences outside the typical
white male's.

------
abalone
Thank you for posting this. I thought the story was fishy too. Hopefully
everyone reading this knows you can't generally trace an IP to an exact home
address without help from the ISP.

People are WAY too eager to explain that away with "oh he must have cross
checked it with his registry of friends IP addresses." Nope. As the article
notes, Traynor said the method his "IT friend" used was "almost identical" to
ipttackeronline.com, which does not provide exact addresses.

Great point about the police procedure for handling credible death threats,
too. We don't even have to get into the twitter stuff.

Why would he lie? For attention and sympathy, of course. People do it all the
time.

~~~
prawn
Easy to trace an IP to the ISP that owns it and often an area of a country via
naming schemes.

Not a huge step from there to think "Wait, x uses ISP Y and lives in Z" before
burrowing through emails or checking blog comments, etc. Could be that two
people were commenting from the same IP, but with different devices which
suggested the son rather than the friend could be responsible.

~~~
abalone
Problem is he didn't do that critical second step, the "burrowing through
emails or checking blog comments" for something that links the IP to a friend.

He made the mistake of responding to the criticism of his story's technical
implausability by claiming his friend used a procedure of looking up the IP
location on a general web database. But those only resolve to ISP-level
geolocation, not user-level, as the very post he linked to was later updated
to admit.

Would have been better for him to keep quiet and let us all keep imagining
exotic solutions.

~~~
prawn
I must've missed where he claimed that he didn't do those things? Their
specific methods were always suggested to be something "like x" rather than
exactly like it.

Further, he didn't need a method that worked at identifying all people (as
tripped up 90% of people in the linked explanation), just this particular one.

I run a forum and often try to identify/discourage PITAs. Sometimes just
tracing an IP reveals nothing but the ISP and location/exchange, sure, but
other times it'll give me an employer and so on. Trace an IP, get something
like accessplus.weblink.telstra.net, recognise your pal's Access Plus business
name and you're on your way.

Revealing the method goes some way towards informing future trolls of tricks
available to them.

To me, it seemed that the mysterious method referenced was half about luring
the troll away from Twitter/etc to a place where they could directly record
the IP address. The rest came from there.

Picking out something like this to discredit the entire account is very rough,
IMO, and I flagged this story FWIW.

~~~
abalone
He said it was his friend's house, not a workplace, so your theory is pretty
weak.

He didn't say his IT wizard did something "like" geolocating the ISP, he said
it was "almost identical" to geolocating the ISP.

Furthermore if there were some magical additional steps or wonderous
circumstance that did bridge the gap between ISP-level geolocation and
personal home address, he has absolutely no reason not to spell them out.

Unless he's lying.

You know, what's really fascinating about this whole thing is not why this guy
would fabricate a dramatic story about him confronting a troll. That's easy to
understand. It's why some people have such a powerful need to believe it. So
much that they bend over backwards to find some exotic explanation around all
the holes, rather than seeing them for what they are.

~~~
prawn
People run businesses from home. I outlined a reason someone wouldn't spell
out specific details and others have written more too.

Will leave you to it, I think.

------
Bockit
This is more of an aside than a comment specific to the article.

Over the past year I've felt that the term "troll" is increasingly being
confused with what would have been called "griefing" back in my gaming days.
My early encounters with trolling were that it was your fairly basic ribbing
of friends, nothing particularly malicious. Nowadays, anything and everything
seems to be labelled as trolling when I feel that the circumstances with
malicious intent would be better labelled as griefing. Not only do I think
griefing is a more apt description for the behaviour being associated with
trolling, I think it allows for a distinction between harmless fun and out-to-
cause-harm when describing activity on the internet.

Proper distinction between the two modes would, imo, help keep frames of
reference and hopefully prevent knee-jerk reactions to what is currently
labelled as trolling affecting a more wide variety of interactions.

Also, it would probably help a lot when the next newbie asks you what
"trolling" means as well.

------
jerrya
If someone was sending me DMs that would mean I had followed them.

If I somehow had three IP addresses to general locations, I would wonder who I
had followed in those general locations.

If in one of those locations a friend of mine lived, I might wonder and then
check my email to see what IP addresses had been captured there.

------
woodchuck64
Strange logic or comprehension problem. How did the author go from "does not
work in all cases" to does not work at all? Is he really ready to stake his
reputation on the claim that an IP address can NEVER lead to an individual's
home address?

"(NOTE: this does not work in all cases but even a general location is a piece
in the puzzle when tracking a troll.) The late addition of this note to
‘Tracking a troll’ only confirms what has just been explained in this article
– that an IP address does not enable you to identify an individual’s home
address. An author whose article was specifically referenced by Traynor as
’proof’ of his home address claim, has had to admit that the method given in
his article does not actually allow you to identify someone’s home address"

------
josscrowcroft
Jesus, how much time went into "investigating" this? This is really, really
long.

We all enjoyed the story, and it sounded plausible enough. It had character
depth. It had (kind of) redemption, and forgiveness. It had a boy in an
awkward position that we could _tut tut_ at.

Who gives a shit if it's embellished?

------
roguecoder
When Twitter first started many people auto-followed back anyone who followed
them. There were apps to make this easy; I never did, but it was pretty common
and was how conversations would take place. Twitter dynamics have changed
significantly since the time period he was talking about.

------
Angelo8000
I always get suspicious when I hear the term "almost certainly."

