ericbarbour wrote: ↑Fri Jan 06, 2023 7:54 am
You don't have "supporters" here, and knifing people in the back on this forum isn't nearly as effective as it is on a WMF site. I've
Thank you Eric for putting sand on this f**kstorm that was happening. We started the thread talking about Thomasdiy and how and why Boing! had redacted this edit. This then turned into I was apparently the operator of the Ober-Ranks account from five years ago, because I dared to ask questions about the circumstances behind his banning, then Boing-Alan then admitted to doxing Linked-in of a National Archives federal employee. Realizing this was a bannable offense within itself (although the Wikipedians will never ban Alan) then this then suddenly became that I am supporting Ober-ranks, must therefore be him, and of course Alan-Boing provides the link to the Ober-ranks banning to advertise "See what he did! He deserves everything he got!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... ed_sources
Interesting thing there, one of the users in the vote states that Ober-Ranks should be "terminated with extreme prejudice". For those who don't know, that's code for having someone killed. A death threat by any other name, the Wikipedia management of course didn't really do anything about that and let it stand, not even going so far as to redact the comment. The user who made the threat - EEng - even apparently linked to the definition, as if to confirm what he was saying and is still active on Wikipedia to this day.
So, as I'll be offline for several months working on another story, a couple of things before I leave and sorry in advance for the length of this post. First off, I am not in any way supporting the Ober-ranks account, defending him, or saying his ban was unjustified from that site. It most certainly was justified; in that he was using false source material to a level which Stephen Glass would be proud of. The story I have been investigating is what happened AFTER the ban. Mainly calls to the United States National Archives trying to figure out the Ober-ranks identify, letters written to museums and libraries accusing him of academic dishonesty, and administrators who abused their powers to share protected personal information with each other and finally real-world threats made against the person who they believed was the operator of that account.
The involvement of Alan O. in itself would fill several posts on this forum. He never had any dealings with the Ober-Ranks account when it was active but, riding on the coat tails of Lucas Pietsch (Future perfect at sunrise) appears to have become obsessed and went to extraordinary lengths to dig through apparently deleted and redacted pages on Wikipedia to find out anything he could about the account holder then doxed and stalked sites like Facebook and Linked trying to learn everything he could about this man. To the point also that he was apparently monitoring Linked-in DAILY and knew both that his victim was back in school, which didn't happen until just a few months ago, and knew immediately when he was blocked from viewing his stalking victim's page. And yes, as I shared privately with a moderator on this site, I contacted Linked-in with screenshots of the threads here and also messaged the person whose account Alan was stalking and told them what was going on. I just received a message this morning that "action was taken on my request" so Linked-in apparently found evidence of misuse of their website by Alan and blocked him in some way from seeing this other man's page.
The end game of Boing-Alan I don't know. After looking into the 2019 phone call incident with the Archives, Alan was probably not involved, although I think maybe blackmail was eventually on his mind (like "I know you are Ober-Ranks so give me XYZ or I will tell the Archives you can't be trusted). What Alan doesn't know, which I do since I have now made contact with sources at the Archives, is the person he is stalking is not only a very senior employee but also holds a high security clearance meaning his Internet activities were monitored and if he was really operating that account from work and abusing his authority, which Alan apparently claimed in 2021, the Archives would know about it. This is because its for certain the man Boing-Alan is stalking wasn't operating that account in the past fifteen years, although he probably was before that. Another thing about this case, which Alan-Boing, Pietsch, and others don't want to accept is that the Ober-Ranks account was definitely operated by more than one person.
So, I really don't give the first flying goat f**k if Alan Oscroft believes I operated that account. I know I didn't and I get paid either way when I finish writing this story. I did have my own account on Wikipedia until 2012 which I abandoned after a girl I knew tried to commit suicide because of nonsense on that website. I have been anti-Wikipedia ever since. I work now as a freelance investigative reporter and this story is about the way which Wikipedia harasses and hounds people who have been banned from their site. The Ober-Ranks case is just one of a dozen I'm seen, the worst being a woman in Mexico who was attacked outside her apartment apparently because of something she wrote on Wikipedia and she too was a banned user. I'm also not in any way scared of Alan, as I've dealt with far worse including a Neo-Nazi from Sweden who stalked me for four years and said he was going to rape and kill me and my daughters.
And yes, I've read all the posts now on Wikipedia about the blocks, bans, and the incident in 2021 with Lucas Pietsch blocking all the National Archives research room computers from accessing Wikipedia. I don't have a lot of nice things to say about Pietsch, for a lot of reasons, but in that case, he apparently realized he had f**ked up bad as both the Wikipedia Foundation and the National Archives General Counsel apparently got involved in that one. He really backed off the Ober-ranks business after that, with one exception where he kind of made himself look like an idiot, but that's a different story and so I have to give him respect for walking away from what's a dead issue. It would nice if Boing-Alan would do the same, since sooner or later people are probably going to take an interest in him and ask why a citizen of the United Kingdom has such an obsessive interest in a U.S. federal employee, and also one with a high security clearance. I actually think some people have already taken an interest in that.
There is so much more to this story and hopefully when I finish my article it will be published for all to see. I have spoken so far to several administrators on Wikipedia, a few people at the Archives, but (surprise surprise) the Wikipedia Foundation will not give me a comment on this case. Maybe that will change as the story gets closer to completion.
Here also is the last active page of Ober-ranks from the summer of 2018. Funny, I don't see his "name and awards plastered everywhere" as Boing-Alan claims.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =852003459
The account went inactive, apparently (according to my sources) due to the person operating it suffering a severe illness. Two months later is when the ban happened. I have my suspicions, but haven't yet been able to prove, that Future Perfect-Pietsch had some type of inside knowledge that the Ober-Ranks account operator was ill and initiated the ban at that point since he knew there would be no protest or reply.
I'm off now to cover a real story but will be back in a few months. One thing Boing-Alan didn't yet link to is the original Husnock-Arbitration case (Husnock was the predecessor account of Ober-ranks), which is good reading and shows some of the early problems with that account.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... on/Husnock
The period of 2007 is when I knew Zac and Abagail Brady and had an inside view on a lot of things as to how Wikipedia worked. Abagail is another victim of that site; I was once very close friends with her and saw how Wikipedia ripped apart her soul.
Stay Happy!
-Jenn
