02x02 - My Justice

[bunniefuu]

[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] -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 , active users

become amateur detectives,

sifting through , 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 -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 d*ed.

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 ,
Keenan was 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 sh*t
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 t*rror1st.

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 years,

an activist for years.

When I see tyrants crushing people

and messing with people
and destroying their lives...

that's a m*therf*cking 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 w*r against computer crime.

Authorities in the
United States and Europe

just rounded up some alleged hackers.

[woman] 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 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 .

You know, good old
garden-variety dr*gs,

theft, v*olence, 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 ,

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 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 d*ed,
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 su1c1de

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 m*rder*d.

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 k*lled Morgan,
according to Toni,

broke into the house,

made her drink liquid amitriptyline,

waited several hours
for it to k*ll her,

at some point r*ped 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 m*rder 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 -, -,

-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 thr*at,

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 people
go into Bank of America

and just sit down.

What are they going to get,

$ fine, 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 att*cks

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
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 att*ck.

We met in the chat room,

and each of us pulled out
whatever choice of DDoS w*apon.

And at exactly noon, we fired,
and the site crashed.

At the -minute mark,
I asked everybody to stop.

It took less than
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 years,

plus, just for good measure,

a $ , 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 , 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 su1c1de

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 r*pist, he's a m*rder*r.

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 r*ped,

and there was no evidence
that she was k*lled.

It was clearly su1c1de.

[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 k*ller?"

I'm not protecting a k*ller.

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 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 f*ckin' 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.