Man charged with attacking Phila.gov affiliated with Anonymous, looks like he did it in support of Ori Feibush

The FBI announced Friday afternoon that they'd arrested a guy from Missouri for trying to shut down the city of Philadelphia's website

Says the FBI:

Michael Crockett, 29, of Kansas City, Missouri, was charged today by information with attempting to intentionally damage a computer, announced United States Attorney Zane David Memeger.

The information alleges that between September 24 and 26, 2012, Crocket knowingly caused the transmission of codes and commands to a computer hosting the city of Philadelphia's website, www.phila.gov, in an attempt to shut down that website. This type of attack is known as and described as a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS).

They don't get into anything about why a man in Kansas City, Missouri might have had any interest in shutting down the website for the city of Philadelphia, and we were really curious. So we started looking around, and boy, did we get sucked down that rabbit hole. Come along with us as we find out how this all goes back to City Council candidate Ori Feibush and an abandoned lot at 20th and Annin.

So: We started by trying to figure out who Michael Crockett is. His LinkedIn profile says that he works at KCMO Consulting (and he's the one who registered the site), which does general computer-optimizing for businesses, getting rid of viruses, web design, SEO, that sort of thing. 

Interestingly, the KCMO Twitter has an above-average amount of non-business stuff about BitCoin, NSA surveillance, and introduced themselves in their first tweet as #greyhat:

#HelloWorld ~ We are #KCMOConsulting ~ #NetSec #SEO #Consulting #Marketing #Security #GreyHat | We support #OpCISPA

— KCMO Consulting (@KCMOConsulting) June 19, 2013

@KCMOConsulting also embeds a photo to point out the discreet flag of hacker group Anonymous in the background:

Hey @Rackspace, what's up with the #Anonymous flag in your office? pic.twitter.com/UwBlkmNjJA

— KCMO Consulting (@KCMOConsulting) February 20, 2014

And later refers to Anonymous again:

#Westboro says they will protest a 10 year old girl's vigil; hope #Anonymous shows up! http://t.co/QggRChwVGr | #MO #Anon #WBC

— KCMO Consulting (@KCMOConsulting) February 21, 2014

So maybe this guy had something to do with Anonymous?

EDIT: A few days after this published, we got a call from a guy who for SEO reasons would prefer that we refer to him by just his first name, Tony; he's the actual head of KCMO Consulting, and wanted to clear up that his business has nothing to do with this. He says that despite Crockett's LinkedIn profile saying that he currently works there , Crockett only worked for KCMO as an occasional consultant, first when the site launched a year and a half ago, then again during a redesign in November and December 2013.

Tony is the self-described "Anonymous sympathizer" who runs the @KCMOConsulting Twitter account, not Crockett. "I agree with many things they do," Tony says of Anonymous ops, "but I have no involvement with that."

What's Michael Crockett like? "A normal, nerdy guy," says Tony, who says his former employee is a friend and he "still talk[s] to him on the regular." Interestingly enough, Tony actually said he'd talked to Crockett just that morning — Thursday, March 27 — and that Crockett actually hadn't been arrested. We've reached out to Crockett, who Tony says is figuring out a media strategy with his lawyer at the moment, in hopes of hearing the whole of whatever this crazy-ass story is. Anyway, back to the original post.

And, indeed, Anonymous did target Philadelphia between September 24-26 2012, in something called #OpLibertyCity that was spurred by developer (and now City Council candidate) Ori Feibush.

Real quick, let's clarify: When we say the attack was "spurred by" or "in support of" Ori Feibush, that doesn't mean Feibush asked or wanted Anonymous to do any of this on his behalf. He says he has no idea who these people are, and that the extent of their contact had been a 10-second phone call someone with a voice-modifying program had made to him, which he immediately reported that to the authorities. 

This all started, however, with a vacant lot near Feibush's OCF Coffeeshop in Point Breeze. It was owned by the city, but the city's progress on cleaning it up wasn't fast enough for Feibush. Fed up, he spent thousands of dollars (the number increases with every account) to clean the lot himself. This Inquirer article from the time is a pretty good overview of the situation before the story went national:

But not everyone is happy with the alterations - namely, the lot's owner, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority.

Paul D. Chrystie, director of communications at the Office of Housing and Community Development, said it's a simple matter of trespassing. In an email, he said: "Like any property owner, [the authority] does not permit unauthorized access to or alteration of its property. This is both on principle (no property owner knowingly allows trespassing) and to limit taxpayer liability."

Ori Feibush, the real-estate developer who cleaned the lot and whose coffee shop backs onto the now-controversial plot, said the authority is making a big deal about this because it doesn't like him or the properties he's developed in the neighborhood.

"They don't like nice things," he said. "For a private developer to create a garden, it's a question of who gets credit. To do it without their blessing, you're basically insulting them."

After continued problems with the city about the lot, Feibush launched the website pleasefixphilly.com, which was essentially just him yelling at the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority for what he deemed corruption and standing in the way of progress:

I opened one of the first new businesses on Point Breeze's blighted commercial corridor in years. While I have grown accustomed to a City government that seems to discourage small business, I was not expecting the fight of my life just to open a coffee shop. Where were the elected officials in that fight? I looked behind me and they were definitely not in my corner. I was delayed and stone walled at every turn by the same people elected to serve my neighbors and me.

Now, I clean the lot you took possession of 36 years ago directly behind that coffee shop, making the community safer for all, and you threaten me with a lawsuit. How could you possibly prefer what was there last month to what is there now? I called, texted, and e-mailed your offices for years. I could not get a single person to show up from your agency. I did finally get an official from Licenses and Inspections to visit the lot. He recognized it was a mess and wrote a ticket.....to me!

Feibush refers a few times in this long rant to Point Breeze's City Councilman Kenyatta Johnson — relevant because the Anonymous ops for which Crockett was just arrested were against Johnson's websites as well as phila.gov:

A few hundred feet away from the garden, you sold 2040 Ellsworth Street four years ago for a mere $500. ... How was selling that lot for $500 not fleecing tax payers? Does the Redevelopment Authority not discuss that sale because City Councilman Kenyatta Johnson just bought a new home on that lot?

And because Feibush has already declared his intent to challenge Johnson for his seat in City Council this fall.

Anyhow, the rant had the perfect level of righteous outrage, "don't-give-a-fuck" attitude on the part of Feibush (who has never been lacking for that), and a simple good-guy-stymied-by-bureaucrats story that appealed to a wide swath of people — from lovers of Atlas Shrugged to lovers of urban planning.  The story got really big, making national news in mid-September 2012. 

There's hundreds of comments on Feibush's rant; one of the first ones posted is this:

pra
Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 09/22/2012 - 5:55pm.

We are anonymous We do not Forgive We do not Forget. Expect us

On September 21, 2012, an Anonymous-style video went up that took Feibush completely at his word on everything he wrote. (We say "Anonymous-style" because these videos are far from official. There's templates out there with the Guy Fawkes Newscaster footage and Generic Dramatic Music that make it easy for anybody to edit one together about any topic.) This is that first video:

The video doesn't seem to have been made by someone super familiar with Philadelphia — whatever the situation with the lot at 20th and Annin, it's very unlikely that anybody from Philly on either side of the argument would characterize Feibush as the embodiment of the 99%. Nor is there a situation in the world as uncomplicated as the video's creator "assumes" this one was:

"Anonymous can only assume that a few government officials and contractors are butt-hurt, because they aren't getting their kickbacks this year because of this benevolent trespasser. ... This incompetence and abuse of power clearly shows that we, the people, need to take action and pay the City of Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority and Councilman Kenyatta Johnson a visit. Anonymous demand that the city of Philadelphia immediately retract all claims of wrongdoing by Mr. Feibush and then seek to arrange amicable compensaation for his expenses incurred while doing the government of Philadelphia's job."

Philadelphia officials got a little freaked out by the first video, as "demand" is a pretty menacing word, and sounded a little irritated with Feibush for attracting all this attention on top of it:

The city is taking the video threat seriously.

"We are aware of the video and what it has to say," said Mark McDonald, a spokesman for Mayor Nutter. "The factual basis for those statements is utterly false. The city is taking precautions and that is all I have to say about that piece of it."

He also said he would not discuss whether the city had received any further information about the threat from Anonymous and reiterated that the city had cleaned the lot involved in the Feibush dispute multiple times. He also said the developer had no right to transform a lot he didn't own into seating for his coffee shop.

Feibush told NBC10 that someone claiming to be from Anonymous contacted him about it, and he was also a little freaked out:

Feibush says as soon as he learned of this online threat, he alerted the Mayor's office and Philadelphia Police.

City officials tell NBC10 they are aware of the video and the proper authorities have been notified.

We asked Feibush how he'd been contacted. "Whomever it might have been gave me a 10-second call," from a blocked number and using a voice-altering device, he said. He says he had and still has no idea who it was from, and that he hadn't heard about the recent arrest in the case until contacted by CP today. 

September 22, the day after Feibush was quoted saying he'd alerted the authorities about the mysterious call he got, another Anonymous-style video went up that quoted a complaint Feibush posted on Facebook about Homeland Security showing up at his house: 

Feibush says that he's a little fuzzy on the chronology of what happened, as he hasn't thought about this too much in the year and a half since this all went down, but that he "certainly received a visit from a whole lot of unmarked Crown Vics and sedans" about the Anonymous videos. It appears from the timing that the feds showed up to follow up after Feibush called in the anonymous phone call he'd gotten. 

How did whoever made the video notice Feibush's Facebook post about Homeland Security within hours of it going up? "I have truly no idea. I have a few thousand Facebook friends; if one of them's in Anonymous, that'd be news to me. My friends aren't quite that cool — as far as I know, at least," says Feibush.

In the second video, Guy Fawkes Mask is super pissed off about more than just Feibush being visited by the feds. He's also mad at NBC10 and the media in general for interpreting the previous video as "a threat" when it was in fact "a message to the people of Philadelphia," and tells the city that "you must now suffer the consequences of your corruption." Here's that second video:

More importantly, the video's notes include a link to instructions for where and when parties interested in participating in #OpLibertyCity, #OpPRA or #OpPhillyGovTrash can direct their DDoS attacks:

Targets: http://www.phila.gov & http://councilmankenyattajohnson.com/
Coordinated Lazors daily @ 8pm EST, see pastebin.com/iHRR1F4h

#FAXBomB -> Kenyatta Johnson - Fax: (215) 686-1932
Use: http://freepopfax.com | Use: http://i.imgur.com/qBVVM.jpg

Mon, 15 October: IRL demonstrations @ 1234 Market St Philadelphia
Masks or no masks, all welcome to attend. Notify Philly Occupiers

Those instructions for #OpLibertyCity, #OpPRA and #OpPhillyGovTrash were uploaded by user TheAnon0ne. His profile links to a @TheAnon0ne Twitter account, which has both a lot of tweets about this particular op:

#OpLibertyCity targets: http://phila.gov & http://councilmankenyattajohnson.com | Go Go Go! #DDoS #Anonymous #OpPRA #ExpectUs #lulz #Occupy #ophl

— V (@TheAnon0ne) September 28, 2012

And that account also has a whole bunch of photos from local news and Anonymous protests in... Kansas City, Missouri. 

That's hardly proof that Michael Crockett is TheAnon0ne. More persuasive, though, is the extremely similar Twitter account @TheCrockett0ne, which lists its name as Michael Crockett but which has the exact same profile image, a guy in a Guy Fawkes mask and a suit holding a rifle, as @TheAnon0ne. The tweets from this account seem to be automated, and are mostly about Anonymous ops that TheAnon0ne's profile on pastebin indicates he's involved with.

And then, on Saturday, the @AnonyPress Twitter posted a link to the case with a #FreeAnon0ne hashtag:

Missouri Man Charged with Trying to Shut Down Phila.gov http://t.co/PmtYLS7flo Tweet DdoS https://t.co/oHC1asI6ym #FreeAnon0ne

— Anonymous (@AnonyPress) March 22, 2014

And there you have it! Michael Crockett, some random guy from Kansas City, Mo. arrested by the FBI on charges of digitally attacking phila.gov and Kenyatta Johnson's sites, did not just decide to DDoS the hell out of them out of the blue, or because he had a bad vacation. It appears that he probably did so after being involved with Anonymous for a while, reading Ori Feibush's rant-y account of his dealings with the city and Councilman Johnson after it made national news, and finding it so outrageous that he decided to try to bring Anonymous in to help Feibush out — with no indications that he checked to see if there was another side to the insanely dramatic story of the vacant lot at 20th and Annin.

City Paper: We go down the rabbit hole so you don't have to.