Jan 31, 2008
FBI Ate My Balls
BY DERRICK SOBODASH
f one of the Internet’s “older” denizens, you may remember “Ate My Balls,” one of the earliest examples of an Internet meme to spread off the web and into commercial press. “Ate My Balls” graced the pages of many authors, including the Miami Herald’s Dave Barry.
There were many “Ate My Balls” sites: Charles Bukowski Ate My Balls, Mr. T Ate My Balls and, most special to me, Faelan Ate My Balls.
Now, this is not special to me because Faelan ate my balls; it is special to me because I hosted it, along with the rest of Emucult.
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In 1999, TCI came to sleepy northern Detroit offering the first non-dial-up service in the area to cost less than US $10,000 per month. It was a bargain $49.99 per month — you just had to hide your Unix box when the TCI guys came.
Well they left.
My friend Justin Lydick and I got together to cannibalize what was left of my family’s broken Packard Bell Legend 100 powered by a flawed Pentium 90. We turned it upside down to get the cards to connect on a non-corroded side, I built a fan for its bonded-on fan-less heat sink and we installed FreeBSD.
A couple clicks through Monolith’s static IP mask creation later and yohaku.dhs.org, later daijoubu.dhs.org, was born.
I offered hosting to a lot of people, and overall, the server held up well given the limitations of cable modems. At that time, if I recall correctly, mdw2 was hosting the Emucult Web site for PACHUKA and his crew, but for some reason, his ability to host them vanished. I had him upload it all to my site, and the /~emucult/ user began.
This post is not about my short-lived server: it is about Faelan. However, for those curious about what befell my dhs.org server, it can be summarized with “cyber cops.” It sounds like something out of The Net, but to some extent that was what happened. TCI realized it was losing a crapload more bandwidth than it planned on when it launched its cablemodem service.
Some genius decided it must be because users were reselling bandwidth, so TCI sent its “cyber cops” to go punch in the IP address of every single user in Internet Explorer 4.0. If a Web page came up, they smashed the account with a ban hammer.
Now, a more intelligent person would have simply used wget and a list of IPs in a shell script to smack every server on port 80 and see what gives any return at all. This also ignores the bigger problem of 1999: people were not using their cablemodems to run profitable Web servers — they were using them to run warez trading FTP.
Regardless, TCI got a return from my IP, tanked my service and did one of the most annoying things a Web company can do: call the 17-year-old’s parents. That was fun to explain, because my dad honestly thought the FBI were after them for something I did. And now you understand the cleverly-alluded-to title of this post. Bravo, you win.
But back to Faelan.
Faelan Peregrin Aragorn first appeared on the Internet with his Faelan’s Sweetheart Contest. Or rather, his parents Jonathan and Sarah Aragorn did. Ostensibly, the page was made to look as though it as prepared by the little boy who was looking for a girl who was “fun, slender, gentle and nice, smart, romantic and loyal.”
What can I say, back in 1999, the Internet was not as specialized as it is today. I imagine today it would be “cancer-stricken cocaine whore who loves rough plushie sex and bondage.”
Maybe today these people are just more honest.
“Hi! I am a cute (people say) young (eleven) boy (for sure) and I’m going to have a CONTEST to see which GIRL in the whole world will be the best SWEETHEART and GIRLFRIEND for me!” Faelan, who was named because there was a half-wolf at his birth — whatever that means — wrote on his introduction page. All it was missing was blink tags: the mark of every child pornographer, or at least shitty Web designer.
While we all mocked and giggled at the Faelan contest and made “Ate My Balls” pages about the little monkey man, apparently some were asking more serious questions.
Joab Jackson, a Baltimore City Paper Online columnist, wrote:
Could an 11-year-old really have designed a Web page as elaborate as this one? Could his parents really have approved of him looking for a girlfriend over the Internet? Could any parents be stupid enough to let their daughter participate in such a thing?
Today, such thinking would see Jackson branded a lulz-killer. Then — well, we just never heard of his article because Google didn’t exist and Webcrawler was a piece of shit.
In the mean time, Faelan clarified his quest. He wanted a girl with “nice parents who believe that love and touching are good, and think that you should have the freedom to do all these things.”
I’m sorry, I missed that, is he talking about fucking? Oh, he is.
Despite complaints to the Web host of Faelan’s Web site, the page could not be removed because it was not technically engaged in illegal activity. Solicitation of sexual contact with a minor is actually legal in Oregon.
In October 1999, the contest ended and 11-year-old Faelan vanished into the darkness of the Interbutt. We were sad to see Faelan go. To where did he go? I don’t know. Neither did Jackson, but he being a professional journalist did then what I do now: he investigated.
Jonathan Aragorn, 44, father and alleged holder of degrees in clinical psychology, education and computer science, was convicted on multiple counts of solicitation to commit sexual abuse and criminal conspiracy to commit sexual abuse. He was sentenced on February 22, 2000, my 18th birthday, to 19 months in prison and five years of probation. His wife was found guilty of conspiracy and joined the three-year probation club.
“The Aragorns were busted after a year-long FBI undercover operation in which meetings were arranged between the couple and two child decoys,” Jackson reported.
If you are interested in learning more about the Faelan case since Jackson’s original report, you can read the appeal of State of Oregon v. Jonathan and Sarah Aragorn. I have not been able to find the trial court’s opinion, but if someone can pull it, I will gladly host it.
Reading this, the crux of the parents’ defense was that Oregon Statute 163.345 provides “In any prosecution under * * * ORS 163.427 [or other enumerated sexual offense] in which the victim’s lack of consent was due solely to incapacity to consent by reason of being less than a specified age, it is a defense that the actor was less than three years older than the victim at the time of the alleged offense.” Since this statute is what kept their kids out of trouble, they said it should apply to them as well.
I am not a lawyer, but it sounds like this means that if two children have sex, it’s A-OK in Oregon as long as they are within three years of each others’ age and it isn’t rape. If you take my interpretation as fact and get busted for fucking a 13 year old in Oregon, don’t hold me accountable.
By the way, it’s common practice to conceal the names of children involved in sex abuse causes, so I won’t tell you the real name of “B,” who was 11 years old.
The appeals court slammed the Aragorns and gave Jonathan a “Go Back to Jail Free” card. Apparently that statute is only good if you are an accomplice to underage sex — not if you are the “principal actor.” Moreover, since the statute is a matter law and didn’t affect the Aragorn’s ability to present evidence, failure to instruct the jury on this statute does not matter a damn.
Worse yet, under Oregon statute 161.155:
A person is criminally liable for the conduct of another person constituting a crime if:
(1) The person is made criminally liable by the statute defining the crime; or
(2) With the intent to promote or facilitate the commission of the crime the person:
(a) Solicits or commands such other person to commit the crime; or
(b) Aids or abets or agrees or attempts to aid or abet such other person in planning or committing the crime; or
(c) Having a legal duty to prevent the commission of the crime, fails to make an effort the person is legally required to make.
I bet anything that when this decision was handed down, Aragon would have given anything to trade his education and clinical psychology degrees for a law degree.
Looking back on this curious case with eight years of new knowledge, I have learned three things.
- Faelan did not eat anyone’s balls: he just wanted someone to eat his.
- If I want to build a cyber-harem for my son, Oregon is not the place to do it.
- Internets are serious business.
(This post marks the 10th anniversary of Faelan’s explosion onto the Internet scene in 1998. For special fun, visit his MySpace.)
Only after re-reading it 3 times I feel that I understand this post.
I’m just curious, what is your personal opinion? Do you think that Internet censorship really prevents sexual abuse of underage in general and pedophilia? Do you try to criticize flawed laws?