Dark Net (2016) s02e02 Episode Script
My Justice
[Commander X.]
I think every kid grows up wanting to be a superhero.
You put the towel around your neck and you run around the living room.
I think every kid wanted to swoop in and help people once in a while.
And at least for me, what's happened is I became addicted to the idea.
An FBI car came flying up the sidewalk, and they all converged on me at once.
They handcuffed me and seized my computers.
They had all the evidence they needed, but I never harmed a soul.
I've never done anything besides touch my fingers to my computer and seek freedom and justice.
[narrator.]
In a perfect world, heroes protect us from bad guys.
Laws protect us from criminals.
But this is not a perfect world.
Today's crusaders and vigilantes hide behind user names, and search for clues in the digital trails we all leave behind.
Who's to judge? [Myra.]
Is there justice? Can there be justice? I suppose it's possible if people stopped letting their emotions rule.
But people don't know how to do that.
I don't know, maybe it's the hunters in us, smelling the fear in the prey or something, looking for blood.
[narrator.]
54-year-old Myra is a mother of five and a grandmother of six.
She's also kind of a badass.
[Myra.]
I am a bouncer at a night club, and I also teach self-defense.
I don't like seeing people being picked on.
I don't like seeing people being abused.
It really bothers me, and I'll step in every time.
My father was an investigator for the Public Defender's office in Sacramento, and he'd tell me his latest stories, his latest investigations.
My father discovered that the system isn't quite as perfect as people want to believe it is.
There's a lot of innocent people in jail, and probably a lot of guilty people out of jail, as well.
So his cases were fascinating to me.
There was that little tickle in the back of my brain saying, "I want answers.
" [narrator.]
Piecing together the clues, seeking justice.
It's an impulse that's brought Myra to Websleuths, the biggest true-crime forum online.
Here, more than 100,000 active users become amateur detectives, sifting through 250,000 plus threads on cold-case murders and kidnapped children.
You get sucked in, and sometimes you find things that you never would have imagined.
One day, a story came up, and it was about this 20-year-old girl named Morgan Ingram.
She was young, she was pretty, and her parents believed she was being stalked.
They had wildlife cameras posted around their house, and they caught an image of this person standing in the driveway.
There were lights tripping, rocks hitting the window.
At one point, they claimed that shoeprints were found underneath the bathroom window.
The stalking supposedly went on for months, and the police tried their hardest to figure out what was going on, but they never did catch anybody.
And then one morning, they woke up, and Morgan had died.
They had found her dead in her room, and it just absolutely breaks your heart.
The people who knew her talked about how she was funny, how she was intelligent and artistic.
Now her art, her pictures, her friendships, her loves gone, wiped out.
Her mother had come on Websleuths asking for help in solving this crime, and a lot of us are moms on that board.
And we felt like Morgan could have been our daughter.
So we all dove in.
We were gonna get this guy.
[narrator.]
The Internet has unleashed legions of DIY detectives, and they're casing the network for suspects.
Stand accused online, and it's your innocence that you have to prove.
[Keenan.]
There were so many accusations that I can't even remember all of them.
Basically that I just had to pick this girl out, and that I got some kind of sick kick out of ruining her life.
And I don't even know this girl.
[narrator.]
In 2011, Keenan was 18 years old, a night-shift manager at a local grocery store, when he moved in with his girlfriend down the street from Morgan Ingram and her parents, Toni and Steve.
I honestly have no idea why they picked me out.
I'm assuming it's 'cause I work nights and they were seeing a car drive through the neighborhood at random times.
The police would pull me over or just follow me.
A couple times, cops actually held, like, interrogations with me.
And that's when they told me, "There's a case going on at that house, and you're one of our top suspects.
" It's like, "What am I going to have to do to prove there's no possible way I could have done this?" [narrator.]
Online, there may be no escaping judgment.
Sometimes, your only hope is to try to stay anonymous.
[flight attendant.]
Ladies and gentlemen, in preparation for landing, please make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened.
[Commander X.]
Once they find out that this meeting is taking place, you will come on the radar of U.
S.
law enforcement and quite possibly U.
S.
intelligence.
They will try to find out where you went by tracing your electronic footprint.
And so we can't talk about the details of how we come to be together in this motel room, because that would be information that they would use against us.
Where we're sitting right now, we're in a foreign country, you know.
The United States has no writ here, and that's just tough shit for them, isn't it? [narrator.]
In a room booked under another name, in a city that can't be identified, Commander X is hiding out.
[Commander X.]
If I'm standing up for you, then I'm certainly not scary at all.
If you're the target, however, then I guess I'm a cyber terrorist.
It really is a matter of perspective.
[Anonymous.]
Greetings, people of the world.
Allow me to introduce myself as Anonymous.
[narrator.]
X is in league with Anonymous, the Internet collective notorious for cyber anarchy, for trolling and pranking the establishment, and defacing their websites.
But X is another breed of Anon a hacktivist, leaking data and breaching networks for a higher purpose.
[Commander X.]
I've been a protestor for 35 years, an activist for 35 years.
When I see tyrants crushing people and messing with people and destroying their lives that's a motherfucking problem.
Okay, that's a big problem for somebody like me.
We always had the power as hackers to affect change.
So when I deal with activists in Egypt and Tunisia and Black Lives Matter, I'm able to bring them technological expertise.
I can tell them how to live stream their protests to the world.
If you ask those people who they feel safer about their government, their police or us, those people will tell you, this is what makes them feel safe.
This is what makes them feel empowered.
[narrator.]
X's intentions might be noble, but going after governments and corporations online can bring down real-world consequences.
There's a major takedown in the war against computer crime.
Authorities in the United States and Europe just rounded up some alleged hackers.
[woman.]
14 people across the country now under arrest, accused of being members of a hacking group called Anonymous.
These arrests should send a clear message, that we're not playing around anymore.
[narrator.]
When a hacker's in trouble, who helps him make his case? [Leiderman.]
There was a rebel streak in my soul from day one.
I saw the Grateful Dead 164 times.
Not only did I always want to be a lawyer, but I always wanted to be a criminal defense lawyer.
That's the essence, to me, of freedom of liberty making sure that the state doesn't crush the individual.
[narrator.]
Attorneys are supposed to defend the law.
Jay Leiderman wants to give it an upgrade.
[Leiderman.]
My private practice started in 2006.
You know, good old garden-variety drugs, theft, violence, what have you.
When I first learned about hacktivism, it spoke to me.
These guys are protesting state-sponsored censorship, government oppression.
Things that I care about.
The least I can do is give them some backing.
[narrator.]
Jay is known as "the hacker's attorney.
" In his office and on his phone, he keeps an encrypted chat line open, dispensing pro bono legal advice to hackers in need.
A lot of times, I don't know who I'm talking to.
I don't know where they are.
All of a sudden, someone direct messages me.
And they were like, "Hey.
I've just hacked the whole country of Sweden.
What do I do?" You can make the argument that taking websites offline for weeks on end, or leaving a website a smoking crater in cyberspace that's evil hacking.
But, you know, a lot of the time, small-scale defaces of websites, blocking web traffic those should be considered a legitimate form of protest, and a legitimate form of free speech.
But if you're the government, it just doesn't work that way.
[Keenan.]
I thought I'd just have a normal life for life.
Working all the time, getting a family.
Doing the same thing everybody else does.
I've had some run-in with law enforcement a marijuana charge when I was younger.
Speeding tickets, couple of those.
And that's pretty much it.
[narrator.]
That changed in August of 2011, when Keenan was accused of stalking Morgan Ingram three months before she was found dead.
The police scrutinized his every move, but the data was on Keenan's side.
[Keenan.]
At the grocery store, we had the fingerprint scanner your own private number you had to punch in, with fingerprint recognition.
Otherwise, it wouldn't let you clock in.
The store has 54 cameras, good cameras.
And the Ingrams would call the cops and say, "He's outside my house," or whatever, while they had me on video stocking the shelves.
The night that Morgan died, that's one of the nights that the police really looked into, at the cameras and all that stuff.
And they they realized that I wasn't behind any of it.
[narrator.]
The coroner ruled Morgan's death a suicide by overdose of the painkiller amitriptyline, and the police closed the case.
But online, the trial was just getting started.
[Myra.]
Toni Ingram believed that her daughter had been murdered.
So she started this blog, almost like a diary, day by day following the stalking and the eventual death of her daughter.
It was a major hit.
It almost went viral.
And as Toni's producing this blog, her beliefs about what happened started getting more and more outlandish.
Whoever had killed Morgan, according to Toni, broke into the house, made her drink liquid amitriptyline, waited several hours for it to kill her, at some point raped her, redressed her, and then crept out of the house.
I realized that Toni was grieving and that this was her way of grieving, that she had to tell her story.
But when she started naming Keenan, saying he was responsible for the murder of her daughter, we're like, "Wow.
" I mean, freedom of speech does not allow you to blame people for something that they didn't do.
[narrator.]
Online, anyone can play judge, jury, and executioner.
But isn't that what we love about the Internet, that everyone can speak their mind? After all, it's a free country right? [Leiderman.]
One of the issues for people who call me is that the penalties for computer crimes are so out of whack with penalties for regular crimes.
And that involves congress itself.
Your average congressperson is like a 60-, 70-, 110-year-old white man, and they are scared to death of hackers because they don't understand.
And what we don't understand, we fear.
[narrator.]
Faced with a threat, the government passes a law the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, prohibiting unauthorized access to a computer or server.
[Leiderman.]
The law tries to go after people who are hacking things involving national security, banks, things like that, but as the years roll by, the courts have expanded the definitions to the point where anything now constitutes unauthorized access.
[protesters.]
This is a peaceful protest! [Leiderman.]
Think of this analogy let's say 60 people go into Bank of America and just sit down.
What are they going to get, $250 fine, 5 days in jail? If you do a DDoS, which is a digital sit-in, it's a federal crime.
It's a federal felony.
It's a, you know, it's a big deal.
[narrator.]
DDoS Distributed Denial of Service.
A group gathers online, and in a coordinated strike, sends data packets to a specific website, temporarily crashing it with an overload of information.
A series of cyber attacks made dozens of popular websites inaccessible today.
[man.]
Tens of millions couldn't check their banking accounts or log on to local news.
[narrator.]
Recently, hackers made headlines by cutting off access to Twitter, Amazon, Reddit, Spotify, and banking sites.
But six years ago, Commander X and over 200 fellow hacktivists repurposed DDoS for protests.
Their target was the main page of the Santa Cruz county government.
[Commander X.]
Santa Cruz county has a history of militant gentrification to rid themselves of homeless people.
It's actually against the law to sit on a park bench for more than one hour, and you can't cover yourself with a blanket during certain hours of the night anywhere in public.
And so, that was the motivation of the attack.
We met in the chat room, and each of us pulled out whatever choice of DDoS weapon.
And at exactly noon, we fired, and the site crashed.
At the 30-minute mark, I asked everybody to stop.
It took less than 2 minutes for the website to return to normal function, and that was it.
No servers were breached, no data was stolen.
It's a small, crowdsourced act of civil disobedience.
So none of us took any kind of precautions to hide our traffic, to encrypt our chats.
We were honestly as naive as you could possibly get.
[narrator.]
Nine months later, X was cornered by FBI agents outside a coffee shop.
He and another hacktivist were the only ones arrested in the DDoS.
The indictment listed X's charges conspiracy and unauthorized access of a computer.
[Leiderman.]
Because of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, X would be facing a total of 15 years, plus, just for good measure, a $500,000 fine on top of that.
Sounds reasonable, right? It's unjust to take that many years of my life away from me for protest.
I was out on federal bail, and I had to think very quickly.
I hiked up into the Santa Cruz mountains.
After that, it was a series of safe houses and transportation.
I crossed over from Washington state into British Columbia, and then I was in Canada.
So from my perspective, I'm a political exile.
But according to the U.
S.
Department of Justice, I'm a fugitive.
[Keenan.]
It makes you feel like there's two different kinds of justice.
There's the cops and the courts that closed the case, but then on the Internet, the facts don't always matter.
When the story started spreading online, I started getting hundreds of messages through Facebook, like, per day.
From Canada, Europe, Africa, South America.
Just from people telling me their opinion.
They started coming in worse and worse and worse.
Makes you feel helpless, feel bad about yourself.
The worst part was hurting my family.
[man.]
When I read some of the things, I said, "This isn't my son.
This isn't him.
This isn't the kind of person he is.
" And I did try to make some comments to that effect, to help him.
But on Toni's blog or website, all comments are filtered.
So if she doesn't like it, it never shows up.
It's just gone.
And it's not just one website accusing him, there's many.
The one blog rapidly escalated into multiple blogs.
They seem to just pop up.
We don't even know who's behind them.
We talked to law enforcement and lawyers, even FBI, stuff like that.
And without tens of thousands of dollars, there's nothing you can do.
People can say whatever they want.
[Keenan.]
I'll have the mushroom Swiss burger.
- All right.
- Thank you.
[man.]
As a parent, you're wondering, worrying.
You know, what's in his mind? How is he handling this? Because you don't know You want to fix it.
And you can't.
That's the frustration.
There's just nothing There's nothing you can do.
[Keenan.]
There was nights that I would cry, just not knowing what to do at all, ever.
Giving up has crossed my mind.
Just dying, going away.
Didn't really seem like such a bad option.
[narrator.]
To be hounded by anonymous accusers brandishing digital pitchforks, exposing your name, your face, your family it's happened before.
April 2013, three days after the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI released surveillance footage from the scene, inspiring millions of users on Reddit and Twitter to launch a crowdsourced manhunt.
One user I.
D.
'd the perpetrator as former classmate Sunil Tripathi, who'd gone missing in Rhode Island a month earlier.
And the hunch set off a frenzy.
Sleuths harassed and threatened Sunil's family, until it was discovered that Sunil had committed suicide before the bombing had even taken place.
[Myra.]
I think online, people become so detached from the realities of the lives that they're touching that they don't it's like a TV show, maybe, to them? So, let's say Keenan decided to go to college, or maybe he met a woman that he really loved.
And people do background searches now.
I mean, what was going to pop up? He's a rapist, he's a murderer.
We knew that this man's life was basically gonna be ruined if we didn't do anything.
So a group of us left Websleuths and started our own board where we could discuss Morgan's death in private.
We got ahold of the police reports, the toxicology screens, the forensics, everything.
There were pill fragments found in the stomach contents, and there were large amounts.
There was no struggle, there were no bruises that indicated that somebody was holding her down.
It was very clear that she wasn't raped, and there was no evidence that she was killed.
It was clearly suicide.
[narrator.]
Myra and her team of sleuths took their investigation live with a blog called Truth for Morgan.
With every new hit, the page moves closer and closer to the top of the search results for Keenan's name, displacing the rumors with cold, hard facts.
We weren't trying to say that Toni was a bad person.
We weren't trying to smear Morgan's name.
We just wanted to make sure that everybody who was gonna form an opinion about this, and especially about Keenan, had all the facts.
People said, you know, "How can you protect a killer?" I'm not protecting a killer.
I'm protecting an innocent man.
[Commander X.]
I've never harmed a soul.
I mean, who was hurt by what I did? I'll never see my family again, I'll never see my friends again.
I'll never return to my home country again.
This is a one-way trip.
[narrator.]
Five years into his exile, Commander X is 52 and homeless, panhandling to pay for food.
His DDoS against Santa Cruz didn't change the law, but he's still fighting, helping launch hacktivist ops in Ferguson, South America, and the Middle East.
I don't like fuckin' bullies, and I don't think I ever will.
I'm taking advantage of every moment of liberty that I stole from them, to try to do what I set out to do in the first place, which is bring change to the world.
[Leiderman.]
Any time we chat, Commander X and myself, I have to explain to him listen, you have to return to the jurisdiction, and you have to face these charges.
To which his reply is, "Yeah, lawyer boy, you do my time.
" Even if you don't know who he is or what he does or even agree with him as a person, Commander X is trying to make your life better.
When one person fights for personal freedom against government oppression, that benefits us all.
[Myra.]
The irony is that we started off looking for justice for Morgan, and found injustice instead.
Our mission was just to lay out the facts, and to hopefully help clear this boy's name.
I've never spoken to Keenan, but I hope we succeeded in what we attempted to do.
[Keenan.]
Having somebody on the outside that doesn't know you standing up for you really helped me feel that not everybody in the world hates you.
[narrator.]
In the real world, the exonerated might walk free, but online, old links die hard.
You're sentenced to your search results for life.
[Keenan.]
I've thought about moving away quite a few times, to a different state where there won't be anybody that knows me.
But really, you can't run away.
They still have Internet in Oregon.
It matters to me what people think about me.
I want people to know that I'm not some monster.
Good cast.
But it is a free world, you can believe whatever you want.
I think every kid grows up wanting to be a superhero.
You put the towel around your neck and you run around the living room.
I think every kid wanted to swoop in and help people once in a while.
And at least for me, what's happened is I became addicted to the idea.
An FBI car came flying up the sidewalk, and they all converged on me at once.
They handcuffed me and seized my computers.
They had all the evidence they needed, but I never harmed a soul.
I've never done anything besides touch my fingers to my computer and seek freedom and justice.
[narrator.]
In a perfect world, heroes protect us from bad guys.
Laws protect us from criminals.
But this is not a perfect world.
Today's crusaders and vigilantes hide behind user names, and search for clues in the digital trails we all leave behind.
Who's to judge? [Myra.]
Is there justice? Can there be justice? I suppose it's possible if people stopped letting their emotions rule.
But people don't know how to do that.
I don't know, maybe it's the hunters in us, smelling the fear in the prey or something, looking for blood.
[narrator.]
54-year-old Myra is a mother of five and a grandmother of six.
She's also kind of a badass.
[Myra.]
I am a bouncer at a night club, and I also teach self-defense.
I don't like seeing people being picked on.
I don't like seeing people being abused.
It really bothers me, and I'll step in every time.
My father was an investigator for the Public Defender's office in Sacramento, and he'd tell me his latest stories, his latest investigations.
My father discovered that the system isn't quite as perfect as people want to believe it is.
There's a lot of innocent people in jail, and probably a lot of guilty people out of jail, as well.
So his cases were fascinating to me.
There was that little tickle in the back of my brain saying, "I want answers.
" [narrator.]
Piecing together the clues, seeking justice.
It's an impulse that's brought Myra to Websleuths, the biggest true-crime forum online.
Here, more than 100,000 active users become amateur detectives, sifting through 250,000 plus threads on cold-case murders and kidnapped children.
You get sucked in, and sometimes you find things that you never would have imagined.
One day, a story came up, and it was about this 20-year-old girl named Morgan Ingram.
She was young, she was pretty, and her parents believed she was being stalked.
They had wildlife cameras posted around their house, and they caught an image of this person standing in the driveway.
There were lights tripping, rocks hitting the window.
At one point, they claimed that shoeprints were found underneath the bathroom window.
The stalking supposedly went on for months, and the police tried their hardest to figure out what was going on, but they never did catch anybody.
And then one morning, they woke up, and Morgan had died.
They had found her dead in her room, and it just absolutely breaks your heart.
The people who knew her talked about how she was funny, how she was intelligent and artistic.
Now her art, her pictures, her friendships, her loves gone, wiped out.
Her mother had come on Websleuths asking for help in solving this crime, and a lot of us are moms on that board.
And we felt like Morgan could have been our daughter.
So we all dove in.
We were gonna get this guy.
[narrator.]
The Internet has unleashed legions of DIY detectives, and they're casing the network for suspects.
Stand accused online, and it's your innocence that you have to prove.
[Keenan.]
There were so many accusations that I can't even remember all of them.
Basically that I just had to pick this girl out, and that I got some kind of sick kick out of ruining her life.
And I don't even know this girl.
[narrator.]
In 2011, Keenan was 18 years old, a night-shift manager at a local grocery store, when he moved in with his girlfriend down the street from Morgan Ingram and her parents, Toni and Steve.
I honestly have no idea why they picked me out.
I'm assuming it's 'cause I work nights and they were seeing a car drive through the neighborhood at random times.
The police would pull me over or just follow me.
A couple times, cops actually held, like, interrogations with me.
And that's when they told me, "There's a case going on at that house, and you're one of our top suspects.
" It's like, "What am I going to have to do to prove there's no possible way I could have done this?" [narrator.]
Online, there may be no escaping judgment.
Sometimes, your only hope is to try to stay anonymous.
[flight attendant.]
Ladies and gentlemen, in preparation for landing, please make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened.
[Commander X.]
Once they find out that this meeting is taking place, you will come on the radar of U.
S.
law enforcement and quite possibly U.
S.
intelligence.
They will try to find out where you went by tracing your electronic footprint.
And so we can't talk about the details of how we come to be together in this motel room, because that would be information that they would use against us.
Where we're sitting right now, we're in a foreign country, you know.
The United States has no writ here, and that's just tough shit for them, isn't it? [narrator.]
In a room booked under another name, in a city that can't be identified, Commander X is hiding out.
[Commander X.]
If I'm standing up for you, then I'm certainly not scary at all.
If you're the target, however, then I guess I'm a cyber terrorist.
It really is a matter of perspective.
[Anonymous.]
Greetings, people of the world.
Allow me to introduce myself as Anonymous.
[narrator.]
X is in league with Anonymous, the Internet collective notorious for cyber anarchy, for trolling and pranking the establishment, and defacing their websites.
But X is another breed of Anon a hacktivist, leaking data and breaching networks for a higher purpose.
[Commander X.]
I've been a protestor for 35 years, an activist for 35 years.
When I see tyrants crushing people and messing with people and destroying their lives that's a motherfucking problem.
Okay, that's a big problem for somebody like me.
We always had the power as hackers to affect change.
So when I deal with activists in Egypt and Tunisia and Black Lives Matter, I'm able to bring them technological expertise.
I can tell them how to live stream their protests to the world.
If you ask those people who they feel safer about their government, their police or us, those people will tell you, this is what makes them feel safe.
This is what makes them feel empowered.
[narrator.]
X's intentions might be noble, but going after governments and corporations online can bring down real-world consequences.
There's a major takedown in the war against computer crime.
Authorities in the United States and Europe just rounded up some alleged hackers.
[woman.]
14 people across the country now under arrest, accused of being members of a hacking group called Anonymous.
These arrests should send a clear message, that we're not playing around anymore.
[narrator.]
When a hacker's in trouble, who helps him make his case? [Leiderman.]
There was a rebel streak in my soul from day one.
I saw the Grateful Dead 164 times.
Not only did I always want to be a lawyer, but I always wanted to be a criminal defense lawyer.
That's the essence, to me, of freedom of liberty making sure that the state doesn't crush the individual.
[narrator.]
Attorneys are supposed to defend the law.
Jay Leiderman wants to give it an upgrade.
[Leiderman.]
My private practice started in 2006.
You know, good old garden-variety drugs, theft, violence, what have you.
When I first learned about hacktivism, it spoke to me.
These guys are protesting state-sponsored censorship, government oppression.
Things that I care about.
The least I can do is give them some backing.
[narrator.]
Jay is known as "the hacker's attorney.
" In his office and on his phone, he keeps an encrypted chat line open, dispensing pro bono legal advice to hackers in need.
A lot of times, I don't know who I'm talking to.
I don't know where they are.
All of a sudden, someone direct messages me.
And they were like, "Hey.
I've just hacked the whole country of Sweden.
What do I do?" You can make the argument that taking websites offline for weeks on end, or leaving a website a smoking crater in cyberspace that's evil hacking.
But, you know, a lot of the time, small-scale defaces of websites, blocking web traffic those should be considered a legitimate form of protest, and a legitimate form of free speech.
But if you're the government, it just doesn't work that way.
[Keenan.]
I thought I'd just have a normal life for life.
Working all the time, getting a family.
Doing the same thing everybody else does.
I've had some run-in with law enforcement a marijuana charge when I was younger.
Speeding tickets, couple of those.
And that's pretty much it.
[narrator.]
That changed in August of 2011, when Keenan was accused of stalking Morgan Ingram three months before she was found dead.
The police scrutinized his every move, but the data was on Keenan's side.
[Keenan.]
At the grocery store, we had the fingerprint scanner your own private number you had to punch in, with fingerprint recognition.
Otherwise, it wouldn't let you clock in.
The store has 54 cameras, good cameras.
And the Ingrams would call the cops and say, "He's outside my house," or whatever, while they had me on video stocking the shelves.
The night that Morgan died, that's one of the nights that the police really looked into, at the cameras and all that stuff.
And they they realized that I wasn't behind any of it.
[narrator.]
The coroner ruled Morgan's death a suicide by overdose of the painkiller amitriptyline, and the police closed the case.
But online, the trial was just getting started.
[Myra.]
Toni Ingram believed that her daughter had been murdered.
So she started this blog, almost like a diary, day by day following the stalking and the eventual death of her daughter.
It was a major hit.
It almost went viral.
And as Toni's producing this blog, her beliefs about what happened started getting more and more outlandish.
Whoever had killed Morgan, according to Toni, broke into the house, made her drink liquid amitriptyline, waited several hours for it to kill her, at some point raped her, redressed her, and then crept out of the house.
I realized that Toni was grieving and that this was her way of grieving, that she had to tell her story.
But when she started naming Keenan, saying he was responsible for the murder of her daughter, we're like, "Wow.
" I mean, freedom of speech does not allow you to blame people for something that they didn't do.
[narrator.]
Online, anyone can play judge, jury, and executioner.
But isn't that what we love about the Internet, that everyone can speak their mind? After all, it's a free country right? [Leiderman.]
One of the issues for people who call me is that the penalties for computer crimes are so out of whack with penalties for regular crimes.
And that involves congress itself.
Your average congressperson is like a 60-, 70-, 110-year-old white man, and they are scared to death of hackers because they don't understand.
And what we don't understand, we fear.
[narrator.]
Faced with a threat, the government passes a law the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, prohibiting unauthorized access to a computer or server.
[Leiderman.]
The law tries to go after people who are hacking things involving national security, banks, things like that, but as the years roll by, the courts have expanded the definitions to the point where anything now constitutes unauthorized access.
[protesters.]
This is a peaceful protest! [Leiderman.]
Think of this analogy let's say 60 people go into Bank of America and just sit down.
What are they going to get, $250 fine, 5 days in jail? If you do a DDoS, which is a digital sit-in, it's a federal crime.
It's a federal felony.
It's a, you know, it's a big deal.
[narrator.]
DDoS Distributed Denial of Service.
A group gathers online, and in a coordinated strike, sends data packets to a specific website, temporarily crashing it with an overload of information.
A series of cyber attacks made dozens of popular websites inaccessible today.
[man.]
Tens of millions couldn't check their banking accounts or log on to local news.
[narrator.]
Recently, hackers made headlines by cutting off access to Twitter, Amazon, Reddit, Spotify, and banking sites.
But six years ago, Commander X and over 200 fellow hacktivists repurposed DDoS for protests.
Their target was the main page of the Santa Cruz county government.
[Commander X.]
Santa Cruz county has a history of militant gentrification to rid themselves of homeless people.
It's actually against the law to sit on a park bench for more than one hour, and you can't cover yourself with a blanket during certain hours of the night anywhere in public.
And so, that was the motivation of the attack.
We met in the chat room, and each of us pulled out whatever choice of DDoS weapon.
And at exactly noon, we fired, and the site crashed.
At the 30-minute mark, I asked everybody to stop.
It took less than 2 minutes for the website to return to normal function, and that was it.
No servers were breached, no data was stolen.
It's a small, crowdsourced act of civil disobedience.
So none of us took any kind of precautions to hide our traffic, to encrypt our chats.
We were honestly as naive as you could possibly get.
[narrator.]
Nine months later, X was cornered by FBI agents outside a coffee shop.
He and another hacktivist were the only ones arrested in the DDoS.
The indictment listed X's charges conspiracy and unauthorized access of a computer.
[Leiderman.]
Because of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, X would be facing a total of 15 years, plus, just for good measure, a $500,000 fine on top of that.
Sounds reasonable, right? It's unjust to take that many years of my life away from me for protest.
I was out on federal bail, and I had to think very quickly.
I hiked up into the Santa Cruz mountains.
After that, it was a series of safe houses and transportation.
I crossed over from Washington state into British Columbia, and then I was in Canada.
So from my perspective, I'm a political exile.
But according to the U.
S.
Department of Justice, I'm a fugitive.
[Keenan.]
It makes you feel like there's two different kinds of justice.
There's the cops and the courts that closed the case, but then on the Internet, the facts don't always matter.
When the story started spreading online, I started getting hundreds of messages through Facebook, like, per day.
From Canada, Europe, Africa, South America.
Just from people telling me their opinion.
They started coming in worse and worse and worse.
Makes you feel helpless, feel bad about yourself.
The worst part was hurting my family.
[man.]
When I read some of the things, I said, "This isn't my son.
This isn't him.
This isn't the kind of person he is.
" And I did try to make some comments to that effect, to help him.
But on Toni's blog or website, all comments are filtered.
So if she doesn't like it, it never shows up.
It's just gone.
And it's not just one website accusing him, there's many.
The one blog rapidly escalated into multiple blogs.
They seem to just pop up.
We don't even know who's behind them.
We talked to law enforcement and lawyers, even FBI, stuff like that.
And without tens of thousands of dollars, there's nothing you can do.
People can say whatever they want.
[Keenan.]
I'll have the mushroom Swiss burger.
- All right.
- Thank you.
[man.]
As a parent, you're wondering, worrying.
You know, what's in his mind? How is he handling this? Because you don't know You want to fix it.
And you can't.
That's the frustration.
There's just nothing There's nothing you can do.
[Keenan.]
There was nights that I would cry, just not knowing what to do at all, ever.
Giving up has crossed my mind.
Just dying, going away.
Didn't really seem like such a bad option.
[narrator.]
To be hounded by anonymous accusers brandishing digital pitchforks, exposing your name, your face, your family it's happened before.
April 2013, three days after the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI released surveillance footage from the scene, inspiring millions of users on Reddit and Twitter to launch a crowdsourced manhunt.
One user I.
D.
'd the perpetrator as former classmate Sunil Tripathi, who'd gone missing in Rhode Island a month earlier.
And the hunch set off a frenzy.
Sleuths harassed and threatened Sunil's family, until it was discovered that Sunil had committed suicide before the bombing had even taken place.
[Myra.]
I think online, people become so detached from the realities of the lives that they're touching that they don't it's like a TV show, maybe, to them? So, let's say Keenan decided to go to college, or maybe he met a woman that he really loved.
And people do background searches now.
I mean, what was going to pop up? He's a rapist, he's a murderer.
We knew that this man's life was basically gonna be ruined if we didn't do anything.
So a group of us left Websleuths and started our own board where we could discuss Morgan's death in private.
We got ahold of the police reports, the toxicology screens, the forensics, everything.
There were pill fragments found in the stomach contents, and there were large amounts.
There was no struggle, there were no bruises that indicated that somebody was holding her down.
It was very clear that she wasn't raped, and there was no evidence that she was killed.
It was clearly suicide.
[narrator.]
Myra and her team of sleuths took their investigation live with a blog called Truth for Morgan.
With every new hit, the page moves closer and closer to the top of the search results for Keenan's name, displacing the rumors with cold, hard facts.
We weren't trying to say that Toni was a bad person.
We weren't trying to smear Morgan's name.
We just wanted to make sure that everybody who was gonna form an opinion about this, and especially about Keenan, had all the facts.
People said, you know, "How can you protect a killer?" I'm not protecting a killer.
I'm protecting an innocent man.
[Commander X.]
I've never harmed a soul.
I mean, who was hurt by what I did? I'll never see my family again, I'll never see my friends again.
I'll never return to my home country again.
This is a one-way trip.
[narrator.]
Five years into his exile, Commander X is 52 and homeless, panhandling to pay for food.
His DDoS against Santa Cruz didn't change the law, but he's still fighting, helping launch hacktivist ops in Ferguson, South America, and the Middle East.
I don't like fuckin' bullies, and I don't think I ever will.
I'm taking advantage of every moment of liberty that I stole from them, to try to do what I set out to do in the first place, which is bring change to the world.
[Leiderman.]
Any time we chat, Commander X and myself, I have to explain to him listen, you have to return to the jurisdiction, and you have to face these charges.
To which his reply is, "Yeah, lawyer boy, you do my time.
" Even if you don't know who he is or what he does or even agree with him as a person, Commander X is trying to make your life better.
When one person fights for personal freedom against government oppression, that benefits us all.
[Myra.]
The irony is that we started off looking for justice for Morgan, and found injustice instead.
Our mission was just to lay out the facts, and to hopefully help clear this boy's name.
I've never spoken to Keenan, but I hope we succeeded in what we attempted to do.
[Keenan.]
Having somebody on the outside that doesn't know you standing up for you really helped me feel that not everybody in the world hates you.
[narrator.]
In the real world, the exonerated might walk free, but online, old links die hard.
You're sentenced to your search results for life.
[Keenan.]
I've thought about moving away quite a few times, to a different state where there won't be anybody that knows me.
But really, you can't run away.
They still have Internet in Oregon.
It matters to me what people think about me.
I want people to know that I'm not some monster.
Good cast.
But it is a free world, you can believe whatever you want.