The Porno Patriot's chutzpah could help pay off for America's efforts against Internet terrorism. Jon Messner - the owner-operator of adult Web host Wetlands.net, whose daring cyberjack of Al Qaeda's Website last year made him famous - has been getting attention from the federal government ? and not to shut down his adult sites, either.
No, they want him to help keep the Internet free from terrorism. And, as he revealed in an April 8 talk at National Defense University, Messner has helped put together what he calls a "loosely knit" group he has formed to monitor "hostile activity on the Internet" similar to Al Qaeda. He said the group consists of himself, "some former intelligence agents, some computer experts. It's been of some interest to the military, and they asked me to give a talk," he told AVN Online.com.
Messner was invited to NDU after National Review published an article about his counter-cyberterrorism hijacks. Messner said he is also invited to return to NDU later this year for a not-yet-scheduled forum similar to the April 8 talk.
"When I hijacked [the Al Qaeda Website, al-neda.net], I put up a decoy site and, out of that, we realized the necessity for a group of people who would monitor the Net, particularly the hostile [Islamic] fundamentalist sites, and keep track of their whereabouts and report anything that might actually be germane to terrorism," Messner said in a telephone interview.
Messner admitted he had to talk pretty much off the cuff - any preparation time he had was lost when, shortly after receiving his original invitation to speak, he had to be hospitalized with an illness and had forgotten about his NDU commitment "until the day before. I actually didn't have a real presentation planned, because I just didn't have time. But I did the talk, and it went really well, and they're going to have me back again in the fall for another talk."
Did Messner experience any discomfort among his audience or his sponsors because of his customary business? Not for the most part, though he admitted there remain occasions when officials who call upon him show a little skittishness because of his regular profession. But he also said he hopes what he does might erode a fair volume of the adult Internet's negative image in the mainstream.
"To be honest with you, I got a lot of press when I overtook the Al Qaeda Website, and it seemed to be the first thing the mainstream press latched onto," he said, noting that CNN had first given him the Porno Patriot moniker. "CNN came out and did a whole thing on me. It was flattering, I was shown in a good light, but the porn was first no matter what I did - except in this instance [at NDU]. It never came up."
What matters to him, among other things, Messner said, is that other writers who have chronicled his cyberexploits get only half the story about how he chased Al Qaeda offline - they have it right that he grabbed an available domain name, he said, but they seemed to miss that it was Messner himself who made it available in the first place, reporting what he suspected to the site's domain registrar.
"I don't just sit around and wait for the domain to become available and grab it," he said. "The way I do this is, take a domain like Al-Neda.com. I looked at the registry information, and it was obviously bogus information, and it was registered at the time by Tucows. And I contacted Tucows and demanded they drop the domain name because it violated their [terms of service]. And, to my surprise, they did.
"I keep all these terrorist sites on hand so that, if they'd become available, I would get them. The fact that I actually do something to get these domains to become available [is the part] they miss."
Al Qaeda used a technique called steganographic encryption. "The information on terrorists' sites isn't actually how their information is passed," Messner said. "They use a program called JP Hide. And it allows them to send encrypted messages within a JPEG image that you'd need that program to open up, and you'd have to use a password phrase, to access the message."
Messner's cyberspace counterterrorism didn't stop with Al Qaeda - he also hijacked sites belonging to Hamas and to Saddam Hussein's government. And it wasn't that long before people actually began to put his adult Internet activities aside when contending with him as an anti-terrorism cyberactivist - including the National Review and the NDU.
"[They] didn't see [adult] as any particular relevance to what I was doing [against terrorism]," he said. "To them, I was a patriotic American doing a needed service. I do work with government agencies, and I can't say it hasn't come up in regards to working with the FBI. I mean, they actually said, at one point, 'How is it gonna look, if people know the FBI is working with a pornographer?'
"It kind of took me back because, I thought, what does it matter if what I am doing is of service and value?" Messner continued. "It's not like I was involved in an illegal trade. Everything I do is legal, and I wouldn't see where it would matter. I still don't."
Neither did a presentation participant who spoke to AVN Online on condition of anonymity, and who observed Messner to be "highly professional." "[Messner’s adult affiliation] was not mentioned in the presentation," said the participant. "Jon didn't bring it up, I didn't bring it up. They didn't want the presentation to be sidetracked by a superfluous issue.
"To me, I don't care," the participant continued. "In terms of what he does, in national security terms, it doesn't matter what his day job is. There were people in the audience aware of it, but they didn't seem to mind. The military people? Nobody mentioned it. He presented himself as a private citizen who was doing his bit to help the war on terror."
But the participant also said whether such activities as Messner's might equal a less hostile and more cooperative relationship between the government and the adult Internet depended almost entirely on the specific question at hand.
"In areas where there's a direct mutual interest, yes, probably," he said. "Like child pornography would be one such case, or any kind of illicit activity connected to [adult entertainment], such as smuggling human beings for pornographic purposes. I suspect that, in those areas, where people have knowledge based on what they do every day, [adult entertainment] can be very helpful in pinpointing those people who are acting not just illegally but might present a threat to national security through being linked as well to other illicit activities."
The participant said what impressed him even more about Messner was that he applied common sense and not sophisticated technical knowledge to his counter-terrorism Web takedowns. Or, citing financier Bill Bartman, "Genius is spotting the obvious."
"[Messner] said he's not a techie guy," he said. "He doesn't know a lot of the in-depth stuff. He's using freeware and other stuff he finds on the Web to sort of build his cell of counter-cyberterrorists. And it was non-government, it was just a patriotic guy standing up and doing it."
