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Credit to Author: Timothy McLaughlin| Date: Tue, 06 Aug 2019 22:00:23 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Fredrick Brennan is<\/span> a vivid dreamer, and toward the end of his time running the notorious website 8chan, one sequence would play out in his mind night after night as he slept.<\/p>\n Brennan, wheelchair-bound from <\/span>a genetic disorder, dreamed that he was being hauled away by police and locked behind bars while dressed in an orange jumpsuit. \u201cIn my waking life, I could rationalize that that would never hap\u00adpen,\u201d he says. But at night, in his dreams, denying the risks of operating the site he built and obsessively defended for years through a combination of slippery deflections, free-speech absolutism, and personal attacks was \u201cgetting harder and harder.\u201d<\/p>\n Brennan, 25, is telling me about the days he spent running 8chan while living in a small studio apartment some 20 stories above the sprawl of Manila, far from New York where he began building the site as he came down from a psyche\u00addelic mushroom trip in 2013.<\/p>\n Brennan was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, more commonly referred to as brittle bone disease. His arms and legs are severely bowed from the condition, which, he says, also afflicts his mother and younger brother. He has, by his own tally, suffered dozens of broken bones over his life.<\/p>\n Brennan, photographed in New City in 2014.<\/p>\n Many of the photos of Brennan found online are screenshots pulled from a documentary made about him, a portion of which was filmed when he was 19 at his then-home while he was dressed in bright blue and red Super Mario pajamas. A lava lamp and a stuffed Mario mushroom in the background, he appears considerably younger, barely a teenager.<\/p>\n But when Brennan\u2019s wife opens the door to his apartment on an afternoon earlier this year, two small dogs pinging excitedly across the tiled floor and around his electric wheelchair, he looks far older. A pair of glasses sit slightly crooked on his face. He jokes about the weight he has gained since moving to the Philippines in 2014, where he lives in part because of the cheaper cost of living compared to the United States.<\/p>\n Brennan split fully with the current owner of 8chan last year, but even in this new phase of his life\u2014wife and dogs and all\u2014his role as the gatekeeper of one of the internet\u2019s most controversial sites remains etched on the public record. That association catapulted him into the international media spotlight<\/a> again and again, most recently last weekend in the wake of two mass shootings in the US\u2014one in El Paso, Texas, the other in Dayton, Ohio.<\/p>\n The El Paso shooter posted an anti-immigration manifesto on 8chan minutes before he opened fire on people in a WalMart not far from the US-Mexico border. Its customers are largely immigrants, people of Hispanic descent, and visitors from across the border. Twenty-two were killed and more than two dozen wounded. In Dayton, nine died and 27 were wounded.<\/p>\n Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company that provides content delivery services and protection against denial-of-service attacks across the internet, cut service with 8chan on Sunday, following the attack. The company\u2019s CEO, Matthew Prince, said he was nervous about the decision<\/a>, but that the site was considered a \u201cproblematic user," for a long time.<\/p>\n After Cloudfare\u2019s decision, 8chan briefly found refuge with another provider but was quickly offline again. The site\u2019s current administrator, an American named Ronald Watkins, said in a string of tweets that he was working on getting the site back online. \u201cWe have mitigations going up and strategies are being developed to bring services back online. Doing my best to #StayTheCourse,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Ronald Watkins\u2019 father, Jim Watkins, who owns the site, on Tuesday addressed 8chan\u2019s recent troubles in a YouTube video. Speaking in front of an image of Benjamin Franklin, with taps playing in the background, Watkins denies that the El Paso shooter uploaded his manifesto to 8chan and says it was posted by another person.<\/p>\n He goes on to complain that 8chan is being treated unfairly. \u201cIt is actually sinister behavior,\u201d Watkins says of being kicked offline, a decision he attributes to Cloudfare\u2019s upcoming IPO. \u201cOurs is one of the last independent companies that offer a place you may write down your thoughts free from having to worry about whether they are offensive to one group or the other.\u201d He ends by calling Cloudflare\u2019s actions \u201ccowardly\u201d and \u201cnot thought out.\u201d (After some preliminary emails, Watkins declined to be interviewed by WIRED.)<\/p>\n Also on Tuesday the House Homeland Security Committee sent a letter<\/a> to Jim Watkins demanding that he appear to answer questions about 8chan's extremist content.<\/p>\n For his part, Brennan was delighted to see that the site he created had been knocked off line. He hopes it\u2019s permanent. \u201cIf this is not the end, maybe there will be another shooting and that will be the end,\u201d Brennan told me in an interview Tuesday morning. \u201cI just hope that they give up and throw in the towel. It is time.\u201d He continued, \u201cThe only people that are really going to suffer are mass shooters that wanted to post on 8chan because they knew people would archive their stuff. So they will have to find another way. Boo hoo.\u201d<\/p>\n Fredrick Brennan founded <\/span>and, until 2016, served as the administrator of 8chan, which has provided an anonymous digital safe haven for the type of discussions that made many of its users unwelcome elsewhere on the web: abhorrent racism, violent misogyny, and rampant anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n It has continuously tested the limits of acceptable online discourse, and in its early days served as a safe haven for the most fervent proponents of the GamerGate controversy, which centered on an online harassment campaign targeting women in the videogame industry. But from that small community it has grown in prominence and notoriety, apparently serving as the inspiration for some of this year's most heinous acts of mass violence and raising questions about the role sites like it play in online radicalization.<\/p>\n When the 28-year old Australian shooter stormed into two New Zealand mosques in March, camera strapped to his head, and opened fire, users of 8chan were among the first to know. The self-professed white nationalist, a frequent user of the site, posted his rambling diatribe and plans there and found a cheering squad of other nameless, faceless 8chan users like him. \u201cIt\u2019s time to stop shitposting,\u201d he wrote\u2014a reference to the ironic, misleading, and provocative content that is a hallmark of 8chan discussions, designed to lead less familiar users astray\u2014\u201cand time to make a real-life effort post.\u201d<\/p>\n Slightly over a month later, a 19-year-old took to 8chan, posting a goodbye note beginning with a nod to the people he considered his tribe: \u201cIt\u2019s been real, dudes.\u201d A visitor to the site noticed and called the FBI. But by then, armed with an AR-15, the poster had entered a San Diego synagogue and fired on worshippers.<\/p>\n Together, the gunmen took the lives of 52 people, 51 of those in the two New Zealand mosques and one in the synagogue. Meanwhile, 8chan, their online sanctuary, reached peak mainstream notoriety. After the New Zealand attacks, the site was blocked by internet service providers<\/a> in Australia and New Zealand.<\/p>\n Now it appears that the freewheeling days of 8chan in Manila could be at risk. Jim Watkins and his son have long argued that the site\u2019s US-hosted content only need abide by American laws, which extend generous protection to online speech. For them, Manila was a kind of safe haven. But Jim Watkins has set up a string of business entities, employing Filipinos and (according to immigration records) a handful of expats on Philippine work visas. This appears to make 8chan subject to scrutiny by Philippine law enforcement.<\/p>\n And, indeed, Philippine law enforcement authorities are growing increasingly frustrated with 8chan\u2019s presence in the country. One high-ranking agent told WIRED that they are investigating the website with the help of US counterparts.<\/p>\n Those involved with the site, most notably Jim Watkins, have taken on an air of extreme paranoia. Watkins has accused documentary filmmakers of attempting to break into his house, filming a disjointed speech chastising journalists who sought to contact him and comparing himself at different points to a Jew being pursued by Nazis and his site to Facebook.<\/p>\n But it all started with Brennan: the programmer who dreamt 8chan into being. Now\u2014after what Brennan calls a bitter falling out with Watkins, an intense period of nihilism, and some tinges of guilt\u2014he has become increasingly conflicted about his brainchild and his role in modern internet history.<\/p>\n His misgivings began long before the horrific events in El Paso last weekend. In the days following the New Zealand shooting, Brennan began fielding numerous requests from the media looking for insight into 8chan and its users. Instead of the full-throated defense of the site tinged with a hostility toward the media that he\u2019d served up in the past, Brennan began offering more introspective comments<\/a>. He questioned the direction the website had taken and claimed the administrators were too slow to remove violent threats.<\/p>\n Most startlingly, he said he didn\u2019t care if the site, once his defining accomplishment and identity, was shut down. \u201cSince the time I resigned, I sometimes wonder whether creating 8chan was a good thing. I sometimes wonder about the things that I said in the past while I was being its admin,\u201d he told me in April, less than a month after the New Zealand attacks. \u201cSometimes I think I should have been harder on violent threats. I think maybe I should have worked much harder to improve the moderation systems.\u201d<\/p>\n But while he was running 8chan, Brennan fiercely defended the site as users exposed the personal information of and launched harassment campaigns against those who challenged it. One member of the media who reported on the site said the blowback was terrifying, as users shared the personal information of the reporter\u2019s parents, whose identities were later stolen. The reporter\u2019s publication eventually contacted the FBI for assistance.<\/p>\n As the debate grows over how to address extremist speech online, Brennan is grappling with questions about the site and its impacts himself. He now compares 8chan to a cult, but it was one that he nurtured and remained at the center of until his departure in 2016.<\/p>\n Brennan was born <\/span>in February 1994 in New York state. His parents divorced when he was 5, and Brennan lived with his father and younger brother in Craryville, along the state\u2019s Route 23. His family was, Brennan says, poor. The rural location made life isolating, and boring for someone with a severe disability. \u201cWhat am I supposed to do? Like, I would sometimes sit by a tree and read. But it\u2019s not like I can climb up a tree or play on a swing,\u201d Brennan says. \u201cIt\u2019s not like I can chase down frogs or do any of this stuff kids do.\u201d<\/p>\n The internet offered much of what Brennan was lacking: entertainment, a way to socialize\u2014and, crucially, anonymity, a great equalizer for a kid in a wheelchair among judgmental peers. Brennan played online games, keeping a virtual pet on the cartoonish Neopets site, but ran up against the limitations of the internet of the day. When his father would kick him offline to make a phone call, Brennan would continue to tinker on the computer, enraptured and determined to discover how the machine worked.<\/p>\n His interest grew when his aunt gave him an old laptop in need of constant maintenance. With no computer shop nearby, Brennan began repairing the machine himself. As his interest in computers grew, he also continued to play video games.<\/p>\n His introduction to image boards, and the eventual founding of 8chan, would not have happened without the videogame character Sonic, the anthropomorphic, super speedy blue hedgehog. A group of fans of Sonic Adventure 2<\/em> used an online message board to swap tips and cheat codes. The board, of which Brennan was an active member, was raided by users from 4chan\u2019s \/b\/ board. As a 2014 Washington Post<\/em> explainer put it<\/a>, \/b\/ is \u201ca kind of catch-all\/release valve for all the rape porn, self-harm pics, and creepy drawings of scantily clad children that aren\u2019t allowed\u201d in other 4chan forums.<\/p>\n During raids, \/b\/ users flood another site, hijacking the ongoing conversation and upending the existing community. Brennan, then 12, watched the raid unfold on the Sonic message board. 4chan users involved in the raid, Brennan says, broke their own rule, boasting that they came from the \/b\/ board. It was a blunt introduction to the brash, monkey-wrenching world of 4chan. Brennan\u2019s curiosity was piqued, and he soon began visiting 4chan daily.<\/p>\n Two years later, according to Brennan, his father, whom he speaks of with contempt, placed him and his brother in the care of the state. As he bounced through New York\u2019s foster care system, Brennan says he was isolated. He would return to 4chan for hours, hacking the wireless routers at his foster homes to gain internet access. \u201cI don't want to sound like a victim, but it really dominated my whole life and my whole childhood,\u201d he says of 4chan. \u201cEspecially for somebody with a disability like me, being anonymous on there gave me a way to feel like everyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n At 16 Brennan was released into the care of his mother, a telephone operator at the Caesars casino in Atlantic City. Though he loved being reunited with her, Brennan has few kind words for Atlantic City. What New Jersey marketing materials call \u201cAmerica\u2019s Playground,\u201d Brennan remembers as \u201cthe most depressing place on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n Upon turning 18, Brennan began looking for work, taking small jobs via Mechanical Turk, the online crowdsourcing marketplace run by Amazon. He graduated a few months later from Atlantic City High School. A program for the class of 2012 notes he attained a GPA of 3.0 and had no final mark lower than D.<\/p>\n He eventually made his way from New Jersey to New York, finding work as a programmer. By this time, Brennan was totally immersed in the world of image boards, logging hours a day on the sites. In addition to 4chan, he frequented alternative boards, or \u201calt-chans\u201d\u2014smaller, more niche image boards catering to any number of peculiarities.<\/p>\n He briefly owned Wizardchan, a site for male virgins, but was forced to give up the position after having sex for the first time with a fan. \u201cIt wasn't fair to the users for me to lie and pretend that I was still one of them,\u201d he says of the decision.<\/p>\n During this period, Brennan was becoming increasingly upset with the founder and administrator of 4chan, Christopher \u201cmoot\u201d Poole. Poole started 4chan in 2003 at the age of 15, modeling the site on the popular Japanese site Futaba Channel. By the time Poole\u2019s identity as the founder of 4chan was revealed by The Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a> five years later, the site was well on its way to establishing itself as a \u201ccultural juggernaut,\u201d as academic Whitney Phillips described it in her 2015 book This is Why We Can\u2019t Have Nice Things.<\/em><\/p>\n Poole, speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City in 2010.<\/p>\n 4chan spawned countless memes that would make their way into the main\u00adstream. It was also the launchpad for the hack\u00adtivist group Anonymous. Poole cemented himself as a much-sought-after diviner of internet culture, mixing with tech\u2019s biggest names at the industry\u2019s highest-profile gatherings\u2014including giving a keynote speech<\/a> at South by Southwest in 2011.<\/p>\n At first, Brennan says, 4chan looked like the Wild West. That was part of the attraction. With its stripped down, no-frills look, 4chan was the antithesis of a Twitter or Facebook. As a result, it can be baffling for first-time users\u2014\u201cnew fags\u201d in the site\u2019s lingo\u2014and veteran users delight in singling them out for harassment.<\/p>\n This culture of abuse, says Patrick Scolyer-Gray, an associate lecturer on cybersecurity at La Trobe University in Australia, whose PhD research focused on 4chan users, is simply an aspect of 4chan\u2019s ethos. \u201cBeing mean to each other is just part of operating on 4chan,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n As he logged more hours on the site, Brennan became perturbed by the power held by Poole to remove content and ban users, decisions he says he felt were undertaken arbitrarily. This Wild West had a sheriff.<\/p>\n Fueled by a dose of psychedelic mushrooms and a seemingly bottomless reservoir of anger toward Poole, Brennan began building 8chan in October 2013. (He dubbed it Infinite Chan, using the sideways 8 symbol for infinity. That eventually morphed into a regular 8.) \u201cWhat was important to me was unseating \u2018moot\u2019 in any way I could,\u201d Brennan says, referring to Poole by his 4chan handle. \u201cI don't know why, it's just so weird. But I was like in this very competitive spirit, like, I want to be the top imageboard in the world, and it didn't really matter to me how they got there.\u201d<\/p>\n Brennan advertised his new creation in his old haunts on 4chan, touting features like the ability for users to create their own boards. The goal was to give the communities using the boards more power over them and thus more of a personal stake in the site\u2019s success.<\/p>\n The pitch, for all its idealism, fell largely flat. A few foreign language boards migrated to 8chan after being shut down elsewhere, but Brennan says, it was \u201cbasically nobody for months.\u201d He estimates the site got around 10 posts a day. He continued to work his day job, improving 8chan on the side.<\/p>\n The boost Brennan was looking for would come thanks to his nemesis, 4chan founder Poole. In 2014, GamerGate\u2014the intense battle over sexism in the videogame industry\u2014was spreading from chat rooms and Twitter posts to the front page of The New York Times<\/em><\/a> and the pages of The Atlantic.<\/em> GamerGate, c<\/em>oupled with the dumping of hacked nude photos of celebrities on the 4chan \/b\/ board starting in August 2014, created the biggest crisis in the site\u2019s 11-year history.<\/p>\n Poole decided in September 2014 to ban the GamerGate discussions from 4chan for violating the \u201cno personal information \/ raids \/ calls to invasion\u201d rule, he wrote in a statement. Incensed users accused Poole of selling out, going against the ethos of the site he had created.<\/p>\n When some of these disenchanted, angry users decided to head for another digital home, Brennan was waiting, parroting the ever-shifting defenses of GamerGate and promising extremely limited oversight. \u201cI was the only administrator that just took it and was like, \u2018Hey they got to go somewhere. Why can't it be my site?\u2019\u201d he says.<\/p>\n His new site would offer the kind of freedom that 4chan\u2019s users now perceived they no longer had. They would be constrained only by 8chan\u2019s global rule, \u201cDo not post, request, or link to any content that is illegal in the United States of America and do not create boards with the sole purpose of posting or spreading such content.\u201d (The wording of the rule was tweaked slightly in May 2017.)<\/p>\n Copyrighted content and child pornography ran afoul of this rule and were supposed to be policed by the mostly volunteer moderators, but that didn\u2019t always happen. Boards on pedophilia and \u201cdoxxing\u201d\u2014releasing someone\u2019s personal information like home address and phone number, which often led to online and offline harassment\u2014were allowed, as were legally gray-area images like softcore pictures of kids.<\/p>\n The migration to 8chan was huge. By the fall of 2014, posts spiked to around 5,000 an hour from around 100 a day, Brennan estimates. \u201cSo yeah, it really got crazy there,\u201d he says. With 8chan\u2019s popularity growing, Brennan increasingly poured more hours into the site, quitting his work as a programmer to focus on it full-time.<\/p>\n Almost immediately, though, he ran into financial issues. Image boards are expensive to run, due in part to the large amount of data they use. And as Poole had learned earlier, advertisers were not lining up to risk having their products showcased alongside photos of things like dismembered bodies. Brennan turned to crowdfunding site Patreon to solicit much needed donations but was booted off the platform in December.<\/p>\n While Brennan was building 8chan, his offline life briefly became the subject of interest from the media. The difficulty of living in New York was detailed in two profiles in The<\/em> New York Times<\/em> in 2014. One was published<\/a> in mid-January after Brennan was robbed and then left to find his own way home in a snowstorm after police officers dropped him off at a subway station. The second<\/a> was a follow-up piece in late March on the police department\u2019s efforts to correct its mistakes.<\/p>\n The initial New York Times<\/em> piece generated considerable interest in Brennan\u2019s hardships. In a video filmed at the time, Aaron Parnes, the CEO of Razor Clicks\u2014a company Brennan was then working for\u2014says the outpouring of donations to help Brennan purchase a new wheelchair was restoring Brennan's "faith in the good of humanity and his courage to continue doing his best for himself and others.\u201d (The news network Al Jazeera America also covered Brennan, producing a short documentary \u201cThe Other America: Fredrick Brennan.<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n But just a few months after Parnes, who is Jewish, was appealing for help for Brennan, Brennan was soliciting advice from 8chan users for a piece he was planning to write for the neo-Nazi publication The Daily Stormer<\/em>. He posted a list of potential article ideas on 8chan, a list that was accompanied by images of beer cans dressed as members of the Klu Klux Klan attending a lynching.<\/p>\n One idea was \u201cshitting on \u2018moot\u2019 and 4chan,\u201d but he ultimately settled on writing about his support of eugenics for people like himself with genetic diseases. The article, which was published four days later, ran under the headline \u201cHotwheels: Why I Support Eugenics.\u201d (Brennan used Hotwheels as a handle online.) He says he wouldn\u2019t write for the The Daily Stormer<\/em> again, but he stands by the article\u2019s content. (The article argues that people who can pass serious diseases on to their children should not be allowed to reproduce.) \u201cWas it smart to be in a Nazi newspaper? I have no idea. Probably not,\u201d he says. \u201cBut if you actually read the article, it\u2019s very tame.\u201d<\/p>\n Keeping 8chan online continued to be a struggle as it exceeded bandwidth limits and was kicked off by hosts for offensive content. A lifeline came in the form of an email from a stranger named Ronald Watkins. The son of current 8chan owner Jim Watkins, Ronald, who did not respond to requests for comment, told Brennan that he\u2019d seen the Al Jazeera<\/em> documentary. In short order, Brennan agreed to let Watkin\u2019s company, N.T. Technology, host 8chan, while Brennan maintained the domain and continued as the public face of the site.<\/p>\n Under the agreement, N.T. Technology gave 8chan space in its data center and agreed it would not shut down the site over abuse reports unless they were not quickly acted upon. N.T. did not charge for its services, agreeing instead to receive 60 percent of any profits 8chan made while it was 8chan\u2019s hosting company, according 8chan\u2019s own site history.<\/p>\n Brennan says he did not even know how to spell Philippines, but as part of the deal, he moved in October 2014 to Manila, where Watkins is a longtime resident. Brennan set about running 8chan much in the same manner he\u2019d operated the site from New York, but now in a different time zone and from cushier accommodation, a large condominium in Manila provided by Watkins, according to Brennan.<\/p>\n In January 2015, after the site, then hosted on a .co domain was kicked offline, Brennan decided to \u201cmake the marriage to Jim permanent,\u201d transferring the site to its current domain maintained by Watkins. Jim Watkins now owned the servers and the domain.<\/p>\n Jim Watkins, 55, <\/span>has built his second career and family business exploiting and monetizing the loopholes of the internet. He\u2019s currently petitioning to become a naturalized citizen of the Philippines with a hearing scheduled for October. A notification of his petition published in the English-language Manila Times<\/em> newspaper in February says Watkins was born in Dayton, Washington, a town with a population of just over 2,500 in the state\u2019s southwest.<\/p>\n In a video entitled \u201cMeet 8chan,\u201d filmed after the Christchurch attacks\u2014during which Watkins answers questions from a Filipina host such as \u201cAre you a Jew?\u201d and \u201cHow do you feel about Muslims?\u201d\u2014he says he grew up next to a Boeing airlines factory. The factory was surveyed by his father, he says. His mother later worked there, he says. Watkins served in the US Army for 16 years, where he got his introduction to computers, he said in a 2016 interview with the news site Splinter<\/em>. He left the service, he told the publication, in 1998.<\/p>\n His early internet success came through a streaming porn site called Asian Bikini Bar. The company thrived, Tom Riedel, a longtime business associate and friend of Watkins told Splinter<\/em><\/a>, by working around the strict regulations Japanese authorities imposed on pornography in the late 1990s. Their solution: host content outside of Japan. \u201cThe work we did in the following years was really just marketing uncensored Japanese content to users in Japan,\u201d Riedel told the site.<\/p>\n Watkins arrived in Manila on October 2, 2001, according to his naturalization petition, and married a Filipina woman that same month. The couple have a child together. Over the next few years, Watkins began establishing businesses in the Philippines, according to incorporation documents and company records filed with the country\u2019s Securities and Exchange Commission and obtained by WIRED.<\/p>\n These include at least two technology companies, an organic food company that ran a now shuttered restaurant in a mall, and a property firm. Additionally, Watkins\u2019 naturalization petition notes land holdings outside Manila\u2014likely the location of a pig farm that he has posted about on 8chan.<\/p>\n Watkins\u2019 Instagram account has not been updated since last year, but much of it is dedicated to documenting his travels and his interest in yoga. 8chan, while recently the most notable and certainly the most scrutinized of Watkins imageboard sites, is neither the only one he owns nor the largest.<\/p>\n After hosting 2channel\u2014a hugely popular Japanese bulletin board\u2014on N.T. Technology servers for years, Hiroyuki Nishimura, the current owner of 4chan, launched into a lengthy domain dispute with Watkins. Watkins wrested control of 2channel from Nisihmura in 2014 in a disagreement that drew considerable attention and speculation among imageboard users. Nishimura did not respond to request for comment.<\/p>\n Philippine company documents illustrate the web of companies Watkins has established to run his online properties, including 8chan. Brennan worked on a business visa granted by one of Watkins\u2019 companies, Race Queen, documents from the Philippine Bureau of Immigration obtained by WIRED show.<\/p>\n Race Queen operates from an office on the 23rd floor of a dated, drab building in Metro Manila where a torn paper sign \u201cSoftware Development and Outsourcing Company\u201d is taped to a dirty frosted-glass door. The company is owned primarily by Watkins\u2019 wife, though Watkins is named in its most recent financial filings as chairman and treasurer.<\/p>\n Race Queen was listed as the employer on the Philippine work visas of at least four foreigners in 2015, including Brennan. Johann Oskarsson, an Icelandic computer pro\u00adgram\u00admer whose visa was granted in 2015 and was subsequently renewed until March 2020 said in an email that he had \u201cnothing to do with 8chan\u201d and there was no reason to interview him. After that he stopped responding to further questions.<\/p>\n Two Japanese nationals were also listed as being employed by Race Queen, according to the 2015 documents. Neither could be reached for comment. Employees at Race Queen also wrote Softserve, 8chan\u2019s self-serve advertising system, according to the site\u2019s history, and worked on 2Channel-related projects.<\/p>\n Brennan says he got along well with Riedel and Ronald Watkins, but he was never particularly fond of Jim Watkins. Brennan was unimpressed with the elder Watkins\u2019 computing skills and felt that many of his suggestions were \u201c\u201990s technical advice.\u201d Brennan attempted to undertake a major upgrade of the site, an effort that ultimately failed and is a continued point of contention with Watkins, who Brennan claims never fully supported the project.<\/p>\n Publicly, Brennan was the face of 8chan, granting interviews and partaking in debates to defend the site. One of his most popular defenses was likening 8chan to the phone company or the postal service\u2014just providing the conduit for the messages. \u201cIt's not our fault that these people are using our service like that,\u201d Brennan says of the excuse now. \u201cIf you don\u2019t say that to yourself, you are not going to want to keep going in your job. You know you\u2019re going to want to quit, you\u2019re going to want to just throw up your hands and say, \u2018Oh my God this world is a terrible place. Lord Jesus come quickly,\u2019 is what you\u2019re going to want to say.\u201d<\/p>\n At the same time, Brennan says many people were unaware that Watkins owned the site, a situation he believes Jim Watkins encouraged. \u201cMost of the world genuinely believes that I was the owner of 8chan and that I could shut it down whenever I wanted,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen the truth was, he's the owner.\u201d The stress pushed Brennan to relinquish his role as administrator of 8chan in 2016, handing the position to Ronald Watkins. Brennan continued to work on the Japanese site 2Channel developing new features.<\/p>\n Brennan says his relationship with Jim Watkins was damaged beyond the point of repair in the autumn of 2018. Brennan had grown increasingly unhappy working for Race Queen, which he says lacked direction and operated at Watkins\u2019 whims. According to Brennan, when he requested time off from the company, Watkins appeared at Brennan\u2019s condo and berated his employee. Brennan, who says he was naked when this incident occurred, felt vulnerable and afraid. \u201cBecause I had a really awful childhood, it kind of put me back in that mode,\u201d he says, \u201cof just dealing with an angry parent or foster parent.\u201d<\/p>\n Brennan severed ties with Watkins in December of that year, leaving behind not just a job but a virtual world that had consumed years of his life. He quickly lost any sense of purpose. \u201cI wasn't really sure what to do with myself anymore,\u201d he says. "I kind of felt like either I'm going to try to find religion or I'm going to commit suicide. It was getting really serious. Because I just didn't see a reason to continue.\u201d<\/p>\n Brennan found community in a Baptist church where he met his wife. The two married on Valentine\u2019s Day. \u201cI found some peace in the Bible and in believing in Christ,\u201d he says. \u201cTo me it doesn't really matter if it\u2019s technically true. It just really helps me get through the day.\u201d<\/p>\n The violent threats that proliferated after the New Zealand shooter posted his manifesto should have been quickly removed, but would Brennan have taken down the video of the shooting if he were still in charge? Probably, he told me this spring, but he isn\u2019t exactly sure. \u201cMaybe not. You know? And, that's why I don't want to be an admin anymore. Because I don't want to be making these decisions anymore. It's too hard on me,\u201d he said. \u201cI just don't have the stamina to make them and defend them anymore. Sorry, I just don't, you know. I'm only 25, but I'm worn out.\u201d<\/p>\n A far simpler, and easier, reason to justify shutting down 8chan is that the site does not make money and, Brennan contended, never will. \u201cIf I was like, miraculously given control of the 8chan domain, I would shut it down for economic reasons, so that I don't have to think about the moral reasons,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause there are definitely moral reasons, and I see the arguments. But if I was trying to explain to someone why I shut it down, I would always go to the economic reasons. Because I feel like it\u2019s too difficult for me to go to the moral reasons. Even though I feel them, I really do.\u201d<\/p>\n After the El Paso shooting, Brennan\u2019s views appeared to have evolved, and he was unequivocal. \u201cThe reason 8chan should be shut down is because the owners don\u2019t care at all that people use it to incite violence,\u201d he said Tuesday. \u201cThey don\u2019t care, and that is the problem. You see it is not really free speech to post that you are going to go kill a bunch of people. Even if you don\u2019t do it, that is not free speech.\u201d<\/p>\n Watkins has tried <\/span>to monetize 8chan and the brand created around it. He appears to have had some success. Following the Christchurch shooting, a new feature with the anti-Semitic-tinged title \u201cKing of the Shekel\u201d was unveiled on 8chan. The feature allows users to pay for their threads to appear at the top of the site.<\/p>\n Payments are made through Susucoin, a cryptocurrency developed in part by Ronald Watkins. Development of Susucoin, according to a press release, was taken over last year by the Japan-based Shinoma Co. Japanese business records list Ronald Watkins as the president and representative director of the company.<\/p>\n The most ambitious project to capitalize on 8chan\u2019s notoriety came in 2017, when Watkins launched a news site called the Goldwater, with the seemingly contradictory tagline \u201cBanned, Biased, Honest.\u201d Watkins, who appeared in early Goldwater videos under the name Jim Cherney wearing thick-rimmed glasses, described the outlet as \u201ca public service to provide news to the 8chan community.\u201d He told Buzzfeed in 2017<\/a> that he had 15 million visitors to his various websites and wanted to create a place where they could get their news.<\/p>\n The idea was to post the Goldwater videos and stories to 8chan\u2019s political boards in an effort to drive traffic to the news site. Watkins sometimes awkwardly joined a cast of Asian women, most prominently a host who goes by Diana Printz, a pseudonym which is perhaps a nod to Wonder Woman\u2019s alter-ego. She did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n Printz and the rotating cast of characters appear in disjointed, rambling news videos that often run for over an hour. Major James Burdock, the name used by the site\u2019s editor-in-chief, appears frequently, often wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat, his face sometimes streaked with black and green camouflage face paint.<\/p>\n The two are regularly joined by Tennessee native Philip Fairbanks, who was often a writer on the site\u2019s \u201cPedoGtate Section,\u201d dedicated to conspiracy theories about pedophilia, a popular topic among the alt-right. Fairbanks, after initially agreeing to an interview, backed out and stopped responding to messages. Burdock, too, declined to be interviewed on the record.<\/p>\n The Goldwater\u2019s deepest foray into actual reporting came when Burdock and Fairbanks were accredited to cover the historic summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un hosted in Singapore in June 2018. They were among the 2,500 journalists who were granted press credentials to cover the highly secure and stage-managed event. \u201cAccredited like a boss,\u201d Fairbanks boasts in one of the multiple videos the duo filmed at the event. Singapore\u2019s Ministry of Communications and Information declined to comment on the accreditation process, saying only that it was an \u201cinternal process.\u201d<\/p>\n The coverage the two provided is decidedly amateurish, punctuated by bumbling mishaps. They struggle with their camera equipment; at one point, while attempting a lengthy livestream tour of the sprawling press center, the picture freezes while the audio continues. The problems don\u2019t dampen the duo\u2019s enthusiasm.<\/p>\n Ronald Watktins, in an email sent to Buzzfeed in 2017, said the Goldwater \u201cseems to be gaining more and more momentum each day.\u201d Whatever momentum there may have been was short lived: The Goldwater is currently on hiatus, according to a statement on the site. Watkins has pivoted to a business called books.audio, which produces audio versions of books. The recordings are sold on Amazon. Many of the people associated with Watkins\u2019 other businesses\u2014among them Printz, Fairbanks, and Watkins himself (though under the name A.J. Watkins)\u2014have provided voice-over services for the recordings.<\/p>\n The company behind books.audio is TGW Enterprise, which is registered in Nevada, where business records list Jim Watkins as the president and director and Riedel as the treasurer. When reports about Watkins' connections to the narration company were first published<\/a> in May, he reacted angrily and said the business had been damaged. A post on the Goldwater referred to the story<\/a>, published by the Daily Beast<\/em>, as a smear. The report claimed that books.audio is a main funder of 8chan, but that seems unlikely given its upstart status and the relatively small number of books that its narrators have voiced.<\/p>\n But a key asset of Watkins, and a likely moneymaker, is 2Channel, now called 5ch.net. Nishimura, the site\u2019s former owner, told WIRED<\/a> in 2008 that 2Channel brought in around $1 million a year. Alexa currently ranks the site as the 44th most popular in Japan, one spot below Yahoo. The site is owned by Loki Technology, a company Watkins incorporated in the Philippines in August 2017; Watkins and his wife are its majority owners.<\/p>\n Those in charge <\/span>of running 8chan have maintained that because N.T. Technology is a US company and the data center is located in the US, American laws are the only ones applicable to 8chan. A warning at the top of the site telling users of potentially offensive or adult material posted to some boards carries a disclaimer reading, \u201cIn the interest of free speech, only content that violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) or other United States laws is deleted.\u201d<\/p>\n Any DMCA takedown requests received by the site are posted on a dedicated board. Additionally, the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which laid much of the groundwork for online free speech, gives immunity to internet service providers and webmasters for content created by users.<\/p>\n Victor Lorenzo, chief of the Cybercrime Division at the Philippines\u2019 National Bureau of Investigation, has a decidedly different read on the situation. In an interview this spring, Lorenzo apologizes for the disorganized state of the bureau\u2019s headquarters. An earthquake shook Manila in late April, badly damaging the building, and he was preparing to move into temporary offices set up in the gymnasium.<\/p>\n Lorenzo\u2019s desk is cluttered with figurines of comic book crime fighters; a silver Batman stands tallest among the crowd. Lorenzo joined the NBI in 1992, before, he notes, the \u201cI Love You\u201d virus, created by two Filipino computer programmers, churned through email lists globally causing billions of dollars in damages and leading the country to begin treating cybercrime as a serious threat. Lorenzo became the head of the Cybercrime Division in 2018.<\/p>\n 8chan was a site of interest to law enforcement prior to the Christchurch shooting, Lorenzo says, and that interest only intensified after the massacre. About a month after the attack he was contacted by what he describes as his counterparts in the United States who were interested in 8chan. He declined to name which law enforcement agency reached out to him. But the NBI has a close relationship with the FBI, which maintains a field office at the US Embassy in Manila.<\/p>\n A spokeswoman for the US embassy in Manila did not immediately respond to request for comment. The FBI declined to comment. There is an active investigation into 8chan, Lorenzo says. \u201cThe investigation is ongoing and definitely we will approach them, but we haven\u2019t formulated a specific plan yet. Some government counterparts are already coordinating with us on this and we are working with them.\u201d<\/p>\n While Lorenzo says he believes the site is used to promote violence\u2014and he is concerned about that problem\u2014he says the bureau needs to focus on a specific violation of one of the Philippine\u2019s laws to take action.<\/p>\n To do this, he says, the NBI\u2019s investigation is targeting the alleged prevalence of child pornography on the site, which would violate the country\u2019s Anti-Child Pornography Act. \u201cConsidering that the Philippines was tapped as the epicenter of child pornography materials, we are interested in this issue,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you are going to visit his site, he is actually trying to promote, or catering to, child pornography, and it is a serious offense here.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked about the Watkins\u2019 longstanding position that they only need to abide by US laws, Lorenzo is unmoved. \u201cConsidering that the registration is here,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have jurisdiction.\u201d<\/p>\n Timothy McLaughlin (@TMclaughlin3<\/a>) is a freelance investigative journalist based in Hong Kong.<\/em><\/p>\n