Twitter some days. I tell ya.

Let’s take a hypothetical: say, you’re a self-proclaimed whistleblower and security conference attendee with a Twitter account, a highly-strung nature, and roughly 300 followers. We’ve all been at those conferences. We know what they’re like. Maybe you’re a little bored; maybe you’re a little hungover. Maybe you’re just mean.

For whatever reason, you do this.

Yes, you cc two news organizations, the American Enterprise Institute, and the FBI in that. For professional reasons?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is about to be what the internet calls A Learning Experience.

That would be Griffin Boyce, well-known and respected censorship researcher and coder, digital privacy campaigner, and also a contributor to the Cryptosphere, if nowhere near as often as we’d like.

Internet justice was, as it always is, swift and uncompromising. Ms Bovat went from mocking fat people in front of her 300 Twitter followers (and cc’d institutes and news agencies) to claiming the fat-shaming was actually a compliment, to claiming victimhood herself within a few short hours, on the basis of ADHD, which causes people to lose focus, and dyslexia, which causes them to transpose words, letters, and numerals. Neither ADHD nor dyslexia are typically associated with an irresistible urge to fat-shame others.

Then, presumably because things hadn’t escalated enough, she dragged the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the FBI, the CIA, “inventor of the internet” Al Gore, and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, into the conversation for good measure.

Bovat’s website VoiceOfAModerate contains only a bio and photo, along with a pixillated background image touting her as a Blogger (no blog posts on the site), Change Agent, Opposition Researcher (the site claims she used to work in opposition research for Karl Rove, which essentially gives me carte blanche to dig up her internet trail), and Whistleblower. She has a raft of other websites, though, detailing her 2012 vow to claim refugee status in Canada, an attempt which was apparently unsuccessful, her assertions that she’s a former spy, that she neglected to renew the domain for DODWhistleblower.com, that she’s been charged with stalking Nissan executives (a claim she strenuously rejects on yet another site, in an email to the UN which asserts Nissan is connected to Iran Contra and the Lockerbie bombing), among other dramas. No worries though. She says she’s “‘fighting back’,” her scare quotes. She is, after all, one of the top post-WWII spies, according to her G+ posts.

The doggy day camp video on YouTube is cute, though. I’ll give her that.

Bovat was featured on Jalopnik, the Gawker Media car enthusiast site, which had this to say about her:

Sharyn Bovat was hired by Nissan North America in January 2009 to help relocate corporate executives, a job she had done as an outside consultant. But for the past 16 months [as of May, 2010] she accused Nissan’s U.S. executives of several acts of malfeasance, such as targeting female executives for layoffs and using government money to pad executive perks.

Her protest has taken the form of a growing panoply of websites that combine jeremiads against Nissan executives with tips on marketing Infinitis, letters to the ACLU, political commentary and quotes from Michael Jackson and Hannah Montana all mixed together in a HTML bowl of sick.

Having combed through her tweets prior to that point, we could not find anything we felt answered to the description of an apology. But we did find some things that looked very much like retribution.

Then she claims handicapped status and goes about dismissing those calling her out as leftists and elitists.

Sharyn, Sharyn, Sharyn. This is not winning. One does not have to be elitist to find this behaviour below one’s standards.

Oh. Wait. There it is: the apology. There, that wasn’t hard, was it? Touching, really; we’ve all come so far together through this to reconciliation and peace, right?

Oh.

After tweet-summoning the FBI and DOJ (does that ever work?) and slagging liberals and Millennials and elitists and fat people, and then recommending they seek anger management counselling, she carried doggedly on.

Yes, in the old army phrasing, she has hit rock bottom and started digging.

Now she loves liberals, waving them threateningly (if somewhat confusingly) at those she considers other liberals. Yes, she cc’d the CEO of Apple in that. Maybe she wants him to take away their iPhones? Not sure what she wants apparently-close pal Al Gore to do: take away their internet?

She may or may not hate liberals, but she really, really loves emojis. I would too, if I were that bad with English.

Still hatin’ on them kids, though. As she now informs the CIA, before performing a non-literate “Peace Out.”

Oh, She Mad! via SayItWithGifs.Tumblr.com

Yes, our humble editor/mine humble self waded into the fray, largely because this was a clear case of injustice that could be swiftly dealt with and small-ly because she misses the day her blog was the #3 hit on Google for “Internet Drama.” Damn, good times. Good times.

More with the ageism thing, which if you knew how old I really was would be hilarious. But you don’t: only Facebook keeps that secret. So it’s secure, right Zuck? RIGHT?

And finally, a last, and fair, point by Bovat:

That is true. That is true because our entire experience and knowledge of you amounts to: that you are…this.

Featured image Twitter en la vida real by Rosaura Ochoa on Flickr

Categories: Bigotry, Crypto, Cyberbullies, Encryption, Griffin Boyce, Hackers, Humor, News, Pwnd, Security, Social Media, Trolling, Twitter