Seventeen years ago, a California racist who fancied himself a computer savant, entered a federal prison to start a four year sentence after being convicted of a variety of computer related crimes directly related to his trolling internet message boards.
In the early 2000s, 39-year-old Allan Eric Carlson was a Phillies fan, or so he claimed. (He’s claimed a lot, including being a “political prisoner” on his blog.) He would go onto Phillies fan sites and post racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic and homophobic screeds about Phillies players. He would harass other posters, making the boards an unreadable cesspool of hatred and vitriol.
As a member of that community in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I would cringe when I would see one of his posts under a variety of monikers that typically had the name of Phillies Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt in the name because the post underneath would undoubtedly contain a reference to a Black player’s big lips or how a Latino player was a rapist from Central America.
The board moderators would ban Carlson’s profiles as soon as they could, but he would simply create others by using various email addresses, claiming that they were untraceable.
Carlson was wrong about that, which he would learn when he decided to escalate his trolling. Carlson cloned email addresses used by other board commenters–as well as sports writers at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News whom he considered to be “in” on a conspiratorial plot to sign “inferior” minority players to the Phillies roster to facilitate some sort of social experiment.
Using the cloned email address, Carlson sent tens of thousands of emails to bogus email addresses, causing the email servers handling the cloned accounts to overload as hundreds of thousands of emails bounced back over and over again. The practice caused significant disruption at the Philadelphia newspapers, as well as to the other commenters he cloned–including mine: my email account had thousands of bounce-back error messages over the course of weeks.
The troll became a felon, and the Feds tracked him back through all his sock email addresses to his apartment in Glendale, California. He was convicted of 79 different counts related to identity theft and computer fraud. He was sentenced to 48 months in jail, and all of his future use of the internet would be monitored by the court. He watched the Phillies win the 2008 World Series from a prison cell.
In 2010, he was sent back to prison for tampering with software the court placed on his computer to monitor his usage and for threatening to kill a court officer. Upon his release from prison, he moved to Vineland, New Jersey, where he had another scrap with the law: in 2019, he was cited and fined $5,000 for having dozens of poisonous snakes in the bedroom of his home.
Had he been able to vote in 2016, guess who this violent, isolated white supremacist would’ve cast his ballot for?
Watching today’s trolls attempt to annoy people makes me chuckle, because I have already dealt with the Mac Daddy of Internet Trolls.